What do You think about Dark As Day (2003)?
By far the most interesting and ultimately disappointing part of this book is the detection and attempt at decipherment of a SETI signal. Sheffield made a genuine, if novice attempt at presenting the challenges such a task would require.(view spoiler)[Milly Woo discovered the signal by visually analyzing a signal flagged by an automated system. Then she joined a team of smart people collaborating to decode the message. So far so good.For some reason, the structure of the message was such that it had no clear beginning, just a circular jumble of chapters, in no particular order. This is not what a SETI message would contain. A SETI message would start at a prominent beginning, like a book. Like characters in linear a story, it would introduce all concepts in an order that allows the reader to follow along. Starting with numbers, moving to arithmetic, etc. Sheffield mentions this ramp-up approach to decoding, but for whatever reason ignored the lesson when he imagined his message.He also ignored many basics from computer science. Instead of being separated by a short terminator, like the null terminator of a C-string, his message chapters are delineated by both a start and a stop codon, like DNA. This is pointless because DNA has exons, where as an alien message would not.Finally, the reader never learns ANYTHING important from the message! After the final reveal, the alien message is shown to have been completely unimportant to the plot! (hide spoiler)]
—Gendou
