Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

“Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it’s remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they’re more efficient at processing speech than we are.” “Gotta be efficient at a language if you’re going to be so evasive in it, eh?” “If they were Human I might agree with you,” James replied. “But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units.” “Conceptual units?” Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it. James nodded. “Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The downside is that it’s difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled.”