Have you seen this wonderful movie "Contact" starring Jodie Foster ? She is basically looking for signals from outer space to discover intelligent life. She eventually finds a source that transmits the sequence of prime numbers and this is considered as an answer to her questions. Everyone is convinced that the signal came from conscious, intelligent beings.
My question as a mathematician is, is this absolutely true ? Can we have a non-intelligent physical system producing prime numbers ? I understand that I haven't actually defined the word "intelligent" and that's because it is very hard (if not impossible) to define at this point.
This is some form of Turing test, no?
It could be a program on a computer that does this but then some intelligent life form must have manufactured the computer and coded up the program so are we back to square one ?
Thanks a bunch!