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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

#81

Post by nyrikki »

readyplayeremma wrote: post #32
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 inter…

They are talking about ML, which is statistical pattern matching and finding.

Gödel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century ago unless we make significant discoveries in math.

Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our current constraints are.

We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for the foreseeable future unless there is a major development in pure math.

Remember we can't even build a logically consistent model of arithmetic due to Gödel.

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

#82

Post by goatlover »

jerf wrote: post #52
retrac wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the bandwidth exists, somehow describing enough mathematics to describe a virtual machine, and then sending a program for that virtual machine, might just be the best way to communicate. A package that can help the recipient interpret it by learning and responding to the local environment. I can't put my finger on any specific book but I have the impression of this scenario coming up in science fiction. I've…

Said AI could certainly be programmed to probe for weaknesses in its runtime environment. However... the game theory on that becomes very interesting, because the sender can't assume that the AI's probes will be immediately successful and they will instantly run out and take total control over the host network so thoroughly that the hack can't be detected. And sending out an AI that tries to break out and then tries…

True, game theory makes it less likely a good strategic first move, but you can always come up with scenarios where a super predatory race has set up the signal a long time ago to target nascent space-faring civilizations to preempt them. If the newer civ gets past that, then the aggressive aliens up the threat level and take more drastic action.

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

#83

Post by rmckayfleming »

akkartik wrote: post #63
jerf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trut…

Focusing on the non-scifi angle here, there's one other reason besides C that we end up constantly running data when we think we're parsing it: the depth of our computational stack. https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-depth-... https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098 So I'd say we need 3 things: * Stop using unsafe languages * Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just fol…

With the caveat that you don't literally follow Lisp by having a #. reader macro.

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

#84

Post by michaelcampbell »

convolvatron wrote: post #10
neodymiumphish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-random/unnatural signal?

I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried - don't really need an AI

I wonder if the distributed SETI stuff does this.

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

#85

Post by naasking »

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"?

Because the statistical models powering AI don't have the depth of understanding of a PhD in this field, and so it casts a wide net to ensure nothing gets missed and then a more refined search by human heuristics is needed.

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

#87

Post by uncletaco »

nyrikki wrote: post #81
readyplayeremma wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inter…

They are talking about ML, which is statistical pattern matching and finding. Gödel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century ago unless we make significant discoveries in math. Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our current constraints are. We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for the foreseeable future unless t…

Nitpicky and probably universalist or whatever but the fact that we can't build a logically consistent model was always the case, Gödel just discovered it.

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

#88

Post by fnordpiglet »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #72
tshaddox wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number? If the AI provided 2 candidates is that still too high?

Any 10000s of something is a large number when it involves human work.

Imagine that tax returns for millions of people were all processed by hand not but a few decades ago.

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

#89

Post by nyrikki »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #45
scubakid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could say the same about natural evolution. It's a genetic algorithm. It even involves the intelligence of the species themselves as they pick the fittest mates. Natural evolution as an algorithm isn't fully intelligent like us, but it is intelligent in some sense of successfully solving many optimization problems.

Natural selection is variation, differential reproduction, and heredity. A mostly mindless and mechanistic process of which fitness and mate selection is only a tiny part.

Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate selection due to regression to the mean at population levels.

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

#90

Post by mromanuk »

> "Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not attempt to make a definite conclusion of whether these eight signals are genuinely produced by ET. We encourage further re-observations of these targets." [0]

Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet.

0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf

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