Olaf Lipinski: In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently – with some assuming they convey a threat.

If humanity ended up in such a situation today, our best bet may be to turn to research uncovering how artificial intelligence (AI) develops languages.

But what exactly defines a language? Most of us use at least one to communicate with people around us, but how did it come about? Linguists have been pondering this very question for decades, yet there is no easy way to find out how language evolved.

Language is ephemeral, it leaves no examinable trace in the fossil records. Unlike bones, we can’t dig up ancient languages to study how they developed over time.

While we may be unable to study the true evolution of human language, perhaps a simulation could provide some insights. That’s where AI comes in – a fascinating field of research called emergent communication, which I have spent the last three years studying.

To simulate how language may evolve, we give agents (AIs) simple tasks that require communication, like a game where one robot must guide another to a specific location on a grid without showing it a map. We provide (almost) no restrictions on what they can say or how – we simply give them the task and let them solve it however they want.

Because solving these tasks requires the agents to communicate with each other, we can study how their communication evolves over time to get an idea of how language might evolve.

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How does this connect to aliens? The methods we’re developing for understanding AI languages could help us decipher any future alien communications.

If we are able to obtain some written alien text together with some context (such as visual information relating to the text), we could apply the same statistical tools to analyse them. The approaches we’re developing today could be useful tools in the future study of alien languages, known as xenolinguistics.