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But you'd still need to be able to run the classifier, right? What's the difference between that and a piece of code that just knows the format? There's still a

But you'd still need to be able to run the classifier, right? What's the difference between that and a piece of code that just knows the format? There's still a format here, regardless of how it's being decoded.

ben_w 7y ago
I’m not sure I follow. The idea (if it works is another matter) is that a future civilisation can say “we don’t know what this format is, let’s throw machine learning at it” and even though that machine learning system doesn’t know anything about the format when it starts, it can work it out on its own.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  That would work regardless of the format, so why use ML today? Today you just write a decoder that assumes the format, in the future it can be reversed engineered using whatever means they have available to them.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Would it? I have not heard anyone suggest that JPEG could be decoded using only a self-training ML system.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Why wouldn't it? What makes a format more amenable to being decoded via ML?
      - ben_w 7y ago
        This format comes with its own metaphorical Rosetta Stone.