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AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#31

Post by password11 »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #3

AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.

> AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.

It's in the article.

To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.

The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.

The researchers then returned to the telescope to look at systems from which all eight signals originated but couldn’t re-detect them.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#32

Post by readyplayeremma »

zh3 wrote: post #22

>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

AI is not a well-defined term. This is more likely a specific machine learning technique that is designed to identify all the boring "normal stuff" and ignore it, and then do that at very large scale. By doing that, you can find the interesting parts so that humans with more limited resources can determine if those newly flagged things need to be added to the boring list, or if they do represent something truly interesting.

edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#33

Post by buddhistan »

zh3 wrote: post #22

>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

No one claimed the AI "is so smart" - it's another tool in their kit. The article clearly conveys that the potential is a useful way to augment human-led research by providing a way of quickly processing large datasets i.e. the 20k signals are filtering down 150 terabytes of data which is much more manageable for human analysis. It's not like we have definitive parameters of what constitutes an "alien signal," so we can't exactly create an absolute model for detecting such telemetry. Instead the goal of the article is to simply demonstrate exciting new ways to leverage machine learning methods in different contexts

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#34

Post by jerf »

O__________O wrote: post #2

Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?

It's a bit of a science fiction myth that it is impossible to process a bit of data without executing it, or that data can somehow force itself to be executed by its sheer swaggering potency as data. And a thing that is more true than it should be, because people keep insisting that they are super awesome and totes capable of writing C that can be put on the network. If we'd stop doing this there'd be hardly any truth to it.

It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it.

Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place.

As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#35

Post by 3pac »

neilv wrote: post #21
O__________O wrote: post #2

Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?

An alien signal for which the act of perceiving it causes some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never existed, cascading to every other interaction they've ever had (not had). It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived…

"We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else."

"Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one."

Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.

Seems difficult to defend against.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#36

Post by HdS84 »

zh3 wrote: post #22

>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

Trying to filter noise from data also follows the 80,/20 principle. The rules for the easy cases is written easily but then you have one-offs, maybes and special cases. Trying to filter one of these does not cover anything else. So doing it manually takes the same time.

Case study: had to clean a list of German addresses once. Excluding obviously invalid addresses like some Chinese address was easy. But some addresses had errors which needed a human eye to fix and correct.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#37

Post by remarkEon »

zh3 wrote: post #22

>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than 20,515.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#38

Post by scubakid »

localplume wrote: post #18
BruceEel wrote: post #13

Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...

That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but leaving us all behind.

From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the ones who designed you were dumber.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#39

Post by O__________O »

BruceEel wrote: post #13

Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...

Assuming AGI existed, detected it, and understood the signal’s message — things might get interesting depending on what the message said and how the AGI responded.

Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

#40

Post by zh3 »

remarkEon wrote: post #37
zh3 wrote: post #22

>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than 20,515.

I understand. Still, the point remains that the AI is, in this case, clearly inferior to humans (I would have been impressed if the humans found 20,515 signatures and the AI only - verifably - found eight of them to be worth following up).
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