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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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.

i'm sure an AI SSL version would be much more efficient than 3 round trips. after all, it's supposed to be smarter than what we could make, right?

something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?

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

#93
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"?

The others were "intelligent" signals but from human interference. There's a lot of this so the unique patterns don't occur often enough to automate.

The paper is actually worth reading about this part[1]. They have a moderately complex pipeline that you can think of as a filter: it tries to find anomalous signals.

The stage-1 autoregressor filtered 115M signals to 3M. Then they perform signal processing techniques to remove things like GPS signal contamination ("t can be seen that certain observing frequencies contain a much higher number of events compared with the others—for example, the region around 1,600 MHz. This overlaps with known RFI at the GBT site specifically from persistent GPS signals.").

After this second stage they are left with 20,515 potential signals which were visually inspected.

The issue here is that we don't know what a alien signal looks like so we can't just use a classifier. The pipeline can only find things it has never seen before, but it takes human judgement to decide if these signals are "alien" or more likely contamination from human sources that weren't filtered ("Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them look like false positives associated with RFI signals.")

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that required 1000s of people

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.

"Responded" could be execution of payload.

Turns out it is just 18 hours of static.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false' and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb…

>a radio signal can't cause harm. a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.

Yes safety first! Always be sure to measure the power of your radio signal, and if it's greater than the output of your galactic core, safely move your solar system(s) far enough away to avoid damaging your paint job.

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

#99
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…

If you read the paper itself[1] the random forest is only used in the final stage. The main approach is a convolutional variational autoencoder (which of course is a deep learning model).

The VAE model itself is defined in step 6 in [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...

[2] https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI/blob/4096_pipeline/te...

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

#100
post #81

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…

There is nothing human can do that Turing proved a computer can't do. Gödel ruined the fun of manual theorem testing the same way.
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