The Galactic Pot-Healer Game

Philip K Dick was one of the most inventive Science Fiction Writers of the 20th Century. His books spawned cult films such as Blade Runner and Minority Report. He was obsessed with alternative realities, probably due to the fact that he spent his whole life with his tombstone already made: his parents had not expected him to live and had it made in the first weeks of his life. He was brilliant at predicting the future - much better in fact than Scientists have been.

Science Fiction writers frequently have to come up with plot devices to explain how the hero can understand so many, often alien, languages. In Dr Who, the TARDIS enters the minds of the Doctor's companions to help with translation and for Hitch Hikers Douglas Adams invented perhaps the most imaginative solution - just stick a Babel fish in your ear. Why not just get computer's to do it? In reality, though many humans make it look easy, voice recognition and computer translation are both very hard problems to do well and are going to keep computer scientists and linguists jointly busy for a while yet. Philip K. Dick understood this and turned it into a game.

His 1969 Science Fiction novel "The Galactic Pot-Healer" forsees a world where computers still can't get language translation and understanding quite right. The story starts with bored pot-healer Joe Fernwright playing "The Game" with friends spread around the world. The aim of the game is to fiddle away your life on trivial pastimes to avoid work (why does texting come to mind? :-) You take a phrase, book or film title and translate it backwards and forwards between languages using voice-recognition translation computers until the wacky mistakes they make build up to something cryptic. The opponent then has to work out what you started with. For example, in one of the games played in the book, Joe tests his opponent with:

The male offspring in addition gets out of bed

which the translation computers supposedly translated from

The sun also rises

The Galactic Pot Healer world is already here, at least as far as translation computers round the world go, so you can now play the Game by linking to translation sites like Google Language Tools or Babel Fish. The only differences to the book is today you would send queries by text over the web rather than voice over a phone. Even without voice recognition mistakes you can get weird results. Here is what a combination of Google Translate and Babel Fish did to another one from the book: "For Whom the Bell Tolls"...

For, that it announces the cheek

The skill of the game is in coming up with a phrase and a suitable series of languages to translate it through so that it becomes cryptic. It ought to be understandable once told the answer though ...with my attempt above it's hard to see remotely what they meant. Somewhere along the line bell was translated to flange then into cheek:

Pour qui le peage de horloge
For, who announces the bell
Per, che annuncia la flangia
Pour, qu'il annonce la joue
For, that it announces the cheek

Who knows perhaps fiction will turn into reality and the Game will really become a craze. Its a perfect game to play by texting after all.

Here is one for you to try that was created just using Babel Fish and only a couple of languages...

Which books and play is:

Its obscure matters

Answer in the middle of the maze.