New paper on “Goal Oriented Communication”

An intriguing paper titled “A Theory of Goal-Oriented Communication” by Oded Goldreich, Brendan Juba, and Madhu Sudan has recently been uploaded to the ECCC, expanding a line of work started by the last two authors here and here.  The basic issue studied is how is it possible to effectively communicate without agreeing on a language in advance.  The basic result obtained is that, as long as the parties can “sense” whether some progress is made toward their goals,  prior agreement about a language is not necessary and a “universal”  protocol exists.  My nerdier side cannot help but thinking about the application to communicating with an alien species (which I bet the authors did not mention on purpose.)

It is obviously hard to tell yet whether this is a beginning of a great new intellectual journey or just a blind alley but,  In any case, I suppose that this is the kind of work sought by the ICS conference.    Despite the game-theoretic-sounding notion of the goals of the communicating parties that underlines the model, conspicuously absent are notions of rationality.

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