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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."
On the 10th anniversary of Douglas Adam's death.
What they're getting at is basically a feedback loop, introduce a few 'words' to the Dolphins so that we have something to start with, then try to learn a few 'words' that the Dolphins already use amongst themselves and then use those words to 'speak' back to the dolphins, maybe adding a few more of our own invention to help with structure.
Honestly though, research has shown that Dolphins can keep track of at least 100 different words... compare that to a great ape which is capable of up to a couple thousand... then compare that to a human which is capable of tens of thousands. Someone up above made the joke that they got the system working and all the dolphins wanted to talk about was mackerel, I suspect that the joke isn't too far from the truth. If dolphins communicate with each other in a significant way, they're going to be communicating things that dolphins care about; where the food is, the dolphin that just joined the group, where the predators are, and, quite frankly, who is having sex with whom. It's fascinating from a linguistics and animal intelligence perspective, but the dialog isn't going to be anything earth shattering or amazing.
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