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

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

#111

Post by nyrikki »

nl wrote: post #99
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…

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...

And deep learning models have no understanding of the underlying data because they are either classification or regression.

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

#112

Post by fnordpiglet »

umeshunni wrote: post #96
fnordpiglet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And the results here were three orders of magnitude less, so they require single digits people.

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

#113

Post by nl »

nyrikki wrote: post #111
nl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And deep learning models have no understanding of the underlying data because they are either classification or regression.

Well the humans are doing classification too so I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.

It's true that this model doesn't know anything outside its training dataset, but that's a different objection.

It's an interesting question as to if there is anything humans do that isn't just classification or regression (and of course regression is just classification over an infinite set where we assign labels to certain ranges and then select the highest probability density).

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

#114

Post by bhawks »

What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise?

The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?

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

#115

Post by stevenhuang »

edgyquant wrote: post #61
godelski wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a clearer example, there's a reason a virus that affects Windows doesn't affect Linux. Or a virus that affects Windows XP doesn't affect Windows 11. There are of course counter examples, but this is the trend. To understand why the counter examples exist requires expert knowledge (or rather that there are basically the same things running in the same way).

We are currently discussing exploits designs by foreign intelligences to infect artificially intelligent systems. We are not talking about privilege escalation on a Mac.

That's where you're confused. The only one insisting the topic under discussion is the infection of AI systems (as opposed to classical computing systems) is you...

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

#116

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

bhawks wrote: post #114

What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise? The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?

How improbable is it to imagine a society that doesn't need encryption?

Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.

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

#118

Post by ETH_start »

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"?

The AI is fast, not smart.

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

#119

Post by BEEdwards »

jojonogo wrote: post #95

Considering that Google Bard spectacularly failed at basic history of the solar system even a child would know to be false, it is laughable that so-called AI could identify alien signals.

You think a child would know off the top of their head that the first picture of an exoplanet wasn't taken by the new shiny telescope in the news and not the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004?

That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way.

People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

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...

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