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Translator Puts Us Closer To Dolphin Communication
LordStormes sent in a link to an article about a new device that may allow dolphins to finally thank us for all the fish. Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project and Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, have been working on a project called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry or CHAT. The pair hope that CHAT will allow them to "co-create" a language with wild dolphins, allowing the two species to communicate. From the article: "Herzing and Starner will start testing the system on wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) in the middle of this year. At first, divers will play back one of eight 'words' coined by the team to mean 'seaweed' or 'bow wave ride,' for example. The software will listen to see if the dolphins mimic them. Once the system can recognize these mimicked words, the idea is to use it to crack a much harder problem: listening to natural dolphin sounds and pulling out salient features that may be the 'fundamental units' of dolphin communication."
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I thought dolphins speak English! What's that matter, can't you take the notion and concept of talking mammals? :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
if the dolphins are smart enough to understand us, they'll play dumb.
We're getting another one of those aw-blah esspanyol sounds!
I am officially gone from
As Stan Smith showed, he taught Steve how to communicate with dolphins and all they, the dolphins, want to talk about is mackerel.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I remember when I was a kid I used to watch some sci-fi series that had a dolphin with a translator device on it, all the people talked to it like another human. Can't remember what it was now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My inner historian is sad that no one mentioned the Rosetta Stone as inspiraton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
"We were all for communicating with you land-dwelling monkeys, but then we saw that Ralph Macchio was put on Dancing With The Stars, and we decided our time would be better spent rubbing our genitals against each other. Now please do fuck off."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
they must be one step closer to translating ponies! Very exciting times we live in! Oh my!!
Ooloorie Eckickeck P'Wheet will be pleased!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
...so a starship caption can come back in time and save the world from an ambiguous dark-matter like blob from space.
I, for one, welcome our new dolphin overlords.
On the 10th anniversary of Douglas Adam's death.
Some forms of communication are designed to transfer information; but others are designed to obscure or refract it. Phony terms like "co-create" do nothing to generate confidence in the legitimacy of this project.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
... was a project that used a huge grid of objects that dolphins used to communicate Wants to humans, and humans equally could activate these.
Not sure what happened to this project though, it was pretty interesting.
It sounded like possibly one of the easiest ways to develop a bridging language between 2 species.
A common representation between the 2 species, they both eventually learn to make the sensory events associated with them so they can each learn them, and after a period of time, there'd be a pretty comprehensive database of both languages between the species.
Of course, dolphins in this case would need to learn each other what we are talking about since the ocean barred them from developing tools and limbs required for complex note-taking.
Good luck to this project and any other interspecies communication projects.
They always say that the first message from aliens would be the biggest thing ever.
But there are aliens right in front of us, waiting to be heard, but we ignore them because they are not like us.
Communicating with other intelligent animals on Earth is something we should be doing.
Many of them are very socially intelligent, some even use nature to their advantage.
We were just the lucky ones this time. We got the right conditions and right external influences that led to our intelligence developing the way it did, that allowed us to think beyond the environment we see.
Dolphins, monkeys, even canines, all show pretty decent intelligence, some equal to that of young, developing humans.
I look forward to the day where I can interact with other species of this world directly. Seems like a nice thought.
Let's see who gets the reference.
of course one needs a properly equipped vehicle. hopefully one that also floats & flies, under droid power, like the citizen hunting drones, used by our rulers, instead of being honest, about anything, ever.
Do a version for sharks and you'll start a quantum leap in laser warfare.
...of these freeloaders coming to our shores from the ocean who don't even speak English! They don't pay any taxes either!
What happens when they start asking questions like "Have you seen my father? He was hanging out with some tuna a while back. One of your boats came by and we haven't seen him since". And of course "Why are you dumping all that crap in the Ocean?"
Awkward!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With any luck, the dolphin words we'll "make up" will already have the meaning of "your mother is a goat", and they will simply be offended.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Hey assholes! Stop crapping up the oceans!
If dolphins are so smart, how come they haven't built a translator to communicate with us yet?
This may be the beginning of the Star Trek universal translator. But, only if it actually works.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Well at least now they can chat you up first.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Don't put in curse words! Just what we don't want to listen to, how we "f**king humans" f**ked up their waters ... blah,blah,blah.
I heard on the Rush Limbaugh show that it'll be good when we learn what dolphins know until they leak the location of Osama bin Laden's grave.
--The Programming goddess from Gorflaz
... Seaquest has finally launched?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I remember an episode of Bullshit where they dealt with the "dolphins are as smart as humans" junk and basically showed how the whole idea went back to some Timothy-Leary-esque "researcher" (John Lilly) who spent his off days dropping acid and spouting nonsense about how the dolphins could heal us too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Freee Meeee!"
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
dolphins use sonar to geolocate and find food. The sonar pattern used also depends on whether they are navigating, searching for prey or attacking. When a dolphin "tells" where to go to find fish, it will play back a stylised summary of the sonar imagery from navigating past the steep cliff, to "seeing" the school of 1kg macrel, to the successful attack.
This 3D communication is efficient and fast, and connects directly to the visual part of the brain. Powerful and emotional imagery can be communicated well.
Humans 1D voice communication compared is inefficient, indirect and lack precision and descriptive elements.
"Riding a bow wave" is a 1D sequence of sound that has very little info or precision compared to the sonar echo of actually riding the wave.
Humans should probably try to speak sonar, rather than try to dumb down a dolphin to speak human
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
"Keep your stinking paws off us, you damn dirty apes!"
Are we really even sure there's a language at use here? A computer can either search for system, syntax and grammar, or just do a frequency analysis on soundbites. If dolphins are using the former then they might have a chance, but if it's the latter the best they can hope for is a dictionary - which sounds much the same, but it's the comparison is akin to a well written program versus a two element CSV file.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
My Douglas Adam is alive and well, thank you very much.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Chimpanzees want to be more like us. "Retired" chimpanzees given the choice between a "wild" setting and a apartment setting chose to split thier time between the two. They like laying on a sofa and watching TV. Tarzan's Chimp like to lay around and watch reruns of himself. or, as Mencken said "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” This may well be true for the rest of the animal kindgom.
Forget quantum computing... I want a dolphin-powered computer.
Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
Well ka gi gi gi chip chirp to you too.
Shouldn't be TOO difficult. They already figured out what the whales are saying...
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
Is it now a rule that every post containing a grammatical correction must also contain grammatical error?
+1... Thanks for the memories!
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
Build one that understands my wife.
Have gnu, will travel.
Suckee dick fiee doraah!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
With the dolphins there is a small problem of different speaking and hearing tonal ranges. We have other cousins in the animal kingdom where this is not such a handicap. I've been fascinated for decades with the work with Koko and others. I've been working on similar research with our wolf friends. We have a pack who works on our farm (the wolf guarding the sheep... and pigs...) so I have gotten to work with them from birth for many of their generations. I don't need a fancy AI to crack their code - I'm the I. Since we have the same vocal range and about the same visual range we can communicate. We have about 300 signs and vocalizations that we use. Recently I've introduced sign backs with the latest generation. Part of what is exciting about this sort of work is that there is on the one hand the language they have that is seemingly universal and then there is what they have learned and are teaching their pups. That's culture.
1) claude shannon information theory says smallest piece of information is the bit. i think it extends to dolphin theory too. the smallest form of anything from a dolphin is the click sound which should be treated as a bit marker. or maybe the time between clicks is what matters. or or or. give me some equipment and i'll do this research for you. They clearly have a code: we just have to break it.
2) three species are listed. human, dolphin, and of course our robot overlords
I want something to translate cat. Then I can finally find out why the little bastards are peeing right in front of the box instead of in it.
It's already been established.
"Nietzsche writes that happiness comes from power. For me, happiness comes from the tender meat of Atlantic mackerel."
Timmy's in the well?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In the least I'm sure they communicate through caressing each other with sonar but that is a very subtle and private communication. You have to actually be being caressed with the sonar to get the full meaning of it; it might not lend well to listening in. For instance I'm sure they would have a way to do the equivalent of tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing in a direction to look. It would lend itself more readily to a communication of emotion.
It will be interesting if they can learn a human language and grammar adapted to their vocal abilities. It would be the equivalent of teaching great apes sign language but much more natural.
"Powerful and emotional imagery can be communicated well."
Huh? How the hell did you figured this out? Did you talked to the dolphins yourself? The human language had allowed us to advance from cave dwellers all the way to the moon. It conveys knowledge, information, wisdom, horror, comedy, tragedy, drama etc. well. Your argument sounds fishy to me (hah!). It is like you are saying birds are superior to man because they have wings.
So you want to introduce new human-created words into dolphin language and then see how much they talk about it? Why not introduce the new words for new things, like a ball or a hamburger? You're just poisoning the minds of the dolphin youth!
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
There, fixed that for you.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
Eek = Yes, Ook = No
Yes, Dolphins are nature's most indecisive creatures.
for most, they actually do but make exceptions for little children. also, putting a different language inbetween makes the whole point of understanding dolphins moot.
Try using a babel fish.
It's gonna be the future soon. Next up, end world hunger.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
You can come up with your own intermediate dolphin-human language by using Leafy Seadragon software from the c2h project on sourceforge.net. US citizens may need a special permit from the feds.
Humans 1D voice communication compared is inefficient, indirect and lack precision and descriptive elements.
But on the other hand, a 1D string of words is just damn easy to store in written form, damn easy to transmit over incredibly long distance while switching medium on the way (dolphins can only transmit their speech in water over short range. We could already convert our data to electrical and radio carrier since long time), damn easy to keep for a long time, damn easy to duplicate.
Thus the whole knowledge of humanity is damn easy to transmit and propagate, even without requiring much premiliminary technology to develop it. Thus we managed to achieve lot of stuff even if our communication system is primitive... exactly *because* it is primitive and easy to share.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ok, so now what, you can hear what the dolphin is saying to his friends, and then you interupt to say what you have to say, the dolphin stops and listens, then he responds, ....etc.... ..."I just wanted to see if it could be done"?
In the end, did we establish anything other then
Seriously, even if they are intelligent to some level, and we can communicate with them, are we going to set up trading, or even get them jobs underwater doing dolphin things that humans need done???
I want to know if we can set up a real live translator for any language in the world, so that as you speak we can hear it in our preferred language, this would remove our limitations when traveling abroad.