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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

#121

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

knowledgepowers wrote: post #54
jacobsenscott wrote: post #48

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.

Are you suggesting an arbitrary celestial signal containing a payload that can execute on heretofore unknown hardware/software of virtually any progeny? Conceivable? Sure. Also about as likely as chatgpt solving the remaining millennium prize problems or spitting out an algorithm to efficiently reverse selected public Bitcoin addresses to their private keys in actionable time. That said, an extraterrestrial object of artificial origin that could interface and hijack wireless communication devices is far more plausible.

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

#122

Post by ericsoderstrom »

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...

wait what. I just read neuromancer and don't see how that applies? Were rio/wintermute ever involved in detecting an alien signal?

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

#123

Post by midoridensha »

goatlover wrote: post #78
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…

But what if like Contact, the signal included plans for building a machine? Except it would be a computer to run the embedded code, which turned out to be an alien AGI having the goal of learning our systems so that it could infiltrate them? Would at least make for a decent scifi story, if it hasn't already been written or produced. I recall how Jody Foster's character in the movie was dismissive of any such concerns…

Contact was very realistic in showing that it's foolish to spend trillions building a machine in the USA to contact aliens, because some religious crazy will destroy it, and such a machine should be built elsewhere.

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

#124

Post by midoridensha »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #107
readyplayeremma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Cyclons were built by humans, had fought a war with them only 40 years before, and most importantly, had human-looking spies living with the humans and seducing the main creator of the computing platform's software to learn its vulnerabilities. They weren't some far-away aliens that had no prior knowledge of the colonies' computing systems.

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

#125

Post by drdeca »

nyrikki wrote: post #110
gowld wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Not thought to be impossible by people who believe in scientific materialism, and current mainstream ideas in theoretical physics (like the Bekenstein bound and such), and who have thought carefully about the issue.

The laws of physics are believed to be computable, and the information content in a bounded region of space, finite. Therefore, it is believed that, in principle, a Turing machine could run an accurate physical simulation of a person, and could therefore do any cognitive task (as far as input/output correspondence goes) that a human can.

If you’d like to explicitly reject scientific materialism though, I’d have no complaints about you doing so.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

jjk166 wrote: post #64
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…

I wonder if in the same way you can do statistical analysis of human languages to determine things like which characters are vowels, perhaps if you received enough programs written in some alien brainfuck-like language you could use statistical analysis to guess which symbol is which. If nothing else you could always brute force it; with 8 logical operators there would only be about 40,000 possible combinations. Mayb…

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by Retric »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #112
umeshunni wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that required 1000s of people

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

Assuming the task was of similar difficulty and the deadline was equally short. I doubt those assumptions hold.

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

#128

Post by FinalBriefing »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #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

Well, they can train the model on things we know _aren't_ alien signals.

Edit: From 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 simulated signals were sounds that couldn't possibly be produced by any (known) natural astrophysical process. So, the model finds signals that have characteristics of artificially generated signals.

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

#129

Post by marcosdumay »

chimen wrote: post #117
randmeerkat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI? You need Rust in there somewhere.

"written in Rust"

Nah, a superhuman AI would be smart enough to not need Rust.

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

#130

Post by nine_k »

O__________O wrote: post #39
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.

Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

Now imagine an AGI actually understanding the message when it gets developed some time later, and, well, doing the required something which the message apparently explains how to do.

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