4 ms·

As usual with these kinds of things the title doesn't match the article. There is no breakthrough in understanding. Instead they identified a thing in the soun

by ars 3y ago

As usual with these kinds of things the title doesn't match the article. There is no breakthrough in understanding. Instead they identified a thing in the sound that changes. They do not understand what it means, they just see it. It could be something, or nothing, or just music.

toss1 3y ago
Indeed, they don't yet understand meaning. But a new understanding of the components of the code and their relationships is certainly a breakthrough towards that understanding. Yes, the headline had me hoping that there was some full understanding (it'd be nice to broadcast to the Orcas off Spain & Gibralter to please not attack the boats), but I can't say that it's clickbait-level.
- tspike 3y ago
  After harvesting the ozone layer using airships that produce eardrum-splitting noise for decades, the aliens achieved a communication breakthrough and were finally able to communicate to the pesky humans: “Please stop attacking our airships. They are very convenient for us.”
ChuckMcM 3y ago
Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from "whale songs are like groans" to "whale songs are like talking". The 'breakthrough' they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex "words." If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a "yes" groan, or a "no" groan. They can't 'tell' you a whole lot. As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me :-)
- sinkasapa 3y ago
  Having read the article. I don't know where one would get the idea that it said anything meaningful about the songs being like "talking", which implies a whole host of features that were not even mentioned. They made analogies with human language phenomena such as suprasegmental features but really this was about there being newly discovered patterns in the sounds. These were not correlated to any specific meaning or purpose. We need those if one is going to talk about the whale song as a communicative system at all, much less a language. With reference to something like Hockett's design features, we have a modality, but despite the existence of a pattern, we don't even know if there is discreteness, necessarily. It is kind of like how children will be taught about atoms and think about the solar system. The analogy may be meaningful or not. The article relies on the readiness of the reader to anthropomorphize the noises made by the animals and misleads them.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    This from the paper's abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought. This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded. The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of "singing" or "calls" that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a "song" suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than "threat" or "help" or "food here" etc.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Morse?
pjungwir 3y ago
Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?
- nequo 3y ago
  It’s being done right now: https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter. And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.
  - rnk 3y ago
    Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.
    - MPSimmons 3y ago
      If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.
    - arcastroe 3y ago
      I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words. I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.
andrew_ 3y ago
Let them cook. That's how many scientific breakthroughs begin.
jdmichal 3y ago
They identified a thing that changes, but in a consistent way across the sample population. That's a very important distinction, because synchronizing vocalizations is not easy. Humans spend a long time learning it. And failure to do it "correctly" can be everything from an accent to a speech pathology, depending on how "wrong" it is. (Scare quotes purely because the definition of right and wrong changes over space and time.)

by ars 3y ago

toss1 3y ago

Indeed, they don't yet understand meaning. But a new understanding of the components of the code and their relationships is certainly a breakthrough towards that understanding. Yes, the headline had me hoping that there was some full understanding (it'd be nice to broadcast to the Orcas off Spain & Gibralter to please not attack the boats), but I can't say that it's clickbait-level.

tspike 3y ago
After harvesting the ozone layer using airships that produce eardrum-splitting noise for decades, the aliens achieved a communication breakthrough and were finally able to communicate to the pesky humans: “Please stop attacking our airships. They are very convenient for us.”

ChuckMcM 3y ago

Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from "whale songs are like groans" to "whale songs are like talking". The 'breakthrough' they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex "words." If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a "yes" groan, or a "no" groan. They can't 'tell' you a whole lot. As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me :-)

sinkasapa 3y ago
Having read the article. I don't know where one would get the idea that it said anything meaningful about the songs being like "talking", which implies a whole host of features that were not even mentioned. They made analogies with human language phenomena such as suprasegmental features but really this was about there being newly discovered patterns in the sounds. These were not correlated to any specific meaning or purpose. We need those if one is going to talk about the whale song as a communicative system at all, much less a language. With reference to something like Hockett's design features, we have a modality, but despite the existence of a pattern, we don't even know if there is discreteness, necessarily. It is kind of like how children will be taught about atoms and think about the solar system. The analogy may be meaningful or not. The article relies on the readiness of the reader to anthropomorphize the noises made by the animals and misleads them.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  This from the paper's abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought. This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded. The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of "singing" or "calls" that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a "song" suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than "threat" or "help" or "food here" etc.
jacquesm 3y ago
Morse?

pjungwir 3y ago

Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?

nequo 3y ago
It’s being done right now: https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter. And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.
- rnk 3y ago
  Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.
  - MPSimmons 3y ago
    If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.
  - arcastroe 3y ago
    I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words. I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.

andrew_ 3y ago

Let them cook. That's how many scientific breakthroughs begin.

jdmichal 3y ago

They identified a thing that changes, but in a consistent way across the sample population. That's a very important distinction, because synchronizing vocalizations is not easy. Humans spend a long time learning it. And failure to do it "correctly" can be everything from an accent to a speech pathology, depending on how "wrong" it is. (Scare quotes purely because the definition of right and wrong changes over space and time.)