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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

#131

Post by marcosdumay »

drdeca wrote: post #125
nyrikki wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you would like to reject scientific materialism (and the empiricism and the dispassionate utilitarianism that go with it), go ahead.

Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.

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

#132

Post by fnordpiglet »

Retric wrote: post #127
fnordpiglet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. I bet the tax returns were harder and had a bounded deadline, unlike an academic research paper.

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

#133

Post by alephxyz »

ericsoderstrom wrote: post #122
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?

(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.

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

#134

Post by drdeca »

marcosdumay wrote: post #131
drdeca wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you would like to reject scientific materialism (and the empiricism and the dispassionate utilitarianism that go with it), go ahead. Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.

Right, or..

Ok, uh, I don’t think one has to really reject empiricism to reject scientific materialism?

Or, err, by “empiricism” do you mean like, “support for doing experiments, and keeping track of the results and what models work good to explain them, etc.”, or do you mean stuff like “rejecting anything that doesn’t have good scientific evidence behind it”? One can do the former without doing the latter.

When I express a belief I have that doesn’t fit with scientific materialism, I make sure to mark it as such, so that people can take that into account. I don’t anticipate any clear externally-verifiable refutation of scientific materialism within my lifetime, and so I don’t anticipate predictions that follow from it to be refuted anytime soon. And I definitely wouldn’t present those beliefs of mine as being the scientific consensus.

I suppose one might accuse me of having a “belief in belief”, seeing as I don’t expect these supposed “beliefs” of mine to be predictively useful any time soon.

But I think it is right that there are goals/values that I place higher than pure predictive accuracy. And beliefs about purpose, and meaning, and what is good, etc. fall into that.

(You mentioned utilitarianism. I’m not a utilitarian, but I do think it is often a very good heuristic, and in many contexts it would be good for it to be used more.)

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

#135

Post by nl »

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.

I'm not aware of any mainstream researcher who thinks the missing text problem[1] is impossible for Turing machines. Perhaps some think neural networks are insufficient to achieve it, but this is a different thing.

[1] https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-wont-solve-the-natu... (Ironically this badly needs updating in a post ChatGPT world, since ChatGPT can solve many of the things this article claims are impossible)

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

#136

Post by mr_toad »

FinalBriefing wrote: post #128
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 (kn…

Or it will identify novel astrophysical phenomena. Which is not a bad thing.

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

#137

Post by nl »

marcosdumay wrote: post #131
drdeca wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you would like to reject scientific materialism (and the empiricism and the dispassionate utilitarianism that go with it), go ahead. Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.

> Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.

To clarify this objection is to @nyrikki's (incorrect) claim that "NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms" and not to anything that @drdeca said right?

I think you are agreeing emphatically with @drdeca but it's possible to read this comment as an objection to @drdeca (NLU may not be as trivial as claimed - ha).

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

#138

Post by mr_toad »

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.

For certain definitions of understanding.

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

#139

Post by mr_toad »

tshaddox wrote: post #58
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"?

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?

> How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number?

It’s a trade-off between false positives and false negatives, and the budget you have to investigate alerts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

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

#140

Post by mr_toad »

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?

> What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication

We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.

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