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

blogs.nvidia.com

101–110 of 161 posts

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

#101
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"inferior" is a funny word for "doesn't perfectly impersonate us".

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

#103
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 think it's useful to replace "AI" with "app" any time you encounter it in the wild. AI is a set of computational techniques that is very broad. The problem with considering "the AI" or "an AI" is that people have in mind some kind of AI agent and that isn't really the case.

AI is also not well defined - day one of my AI course in university opened with "What is AI?" Generally once we figure out how to do something using a computer, we decide that's not really intelligent anymore so the implementation isn't AI. An example of that is the minimax algorithm - it's featured "AI: A Modern Approach"[0] but it isn't really something people think of when they hear "an AI".

[0] https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html

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

#104

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...

From Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal)

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.

"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"

...

The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."

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

#105
> outperforms traditional methods in the search for alien signals

since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

mars attacks aliens: Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!

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

#107

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 seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms. However, if they had preexisting knowledge of computing as implemented on Earth, it would be less complex. If there was a type of malware universal enough to do so, it would probably be some kind of attack against the universal notion of intelligence itself. In which case, you may need to isolate it from humans as well. I think t…

> It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms

tell that to the Cylons

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

#108
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, you are most likely correct, I personally haven't found anything that even gives a reason to hope. But as reductionism and Laplacian Determinism are taught as cannon and not as the best option I sugar coated it.

The Wada property arising in simple models like predator/prey models with simple added factors like fear/cover probably also suggests that even simple models may be indeterminate at least with binary operations like modern algebra is based on.

Three attractors or exit basins can make this unintuitive topological feature pop up. Note that that fractal behavior is topological and not scale invariant noise like is typically studied with topics like fractal scattering.

Indecomposable continua like the Wada property aren't solvable with probabilistic models using automata like in the standard model, which is lucky enough to have less than three exit basins.

Here is one fairly accessable paper on the Wada property.

Hopefully some n-ary algebras may come forward to deal with restricted problems, but even if we could create a logically consistent model of arithmetic, binary operations will still be indeterminate with feature like the Wada property even with perfect knowledge of initial conditions.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365233050_Organized...

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?

You need Rust in there somewhere.

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

#110
post #100
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A human with a piece of paper and a pen could do. AKA writing down an algorithm.

Human reason isn't limited to written algorithms. The missing text problem from NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms but is trivial in most cases for humans.

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