[HN Gopher] AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien ...
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AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
Author : bcaulfield
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-02-09 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.nvidia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.nvidia.com)
| mromanuk wrote:
| > "Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML
| technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not
| attempt to make a definite conclusion of whether these eight
| signals are genuinely produced by ET. We encourage further re-
| observations of these targets." [0]
|
| Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet.
|
| 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf
| whyifwhynot wrote:
| [flagged]
| af3d wrote:
| "Guys - we've found intelligent alien life! We have even decoded
| their signals."
|
| "Amazing, let's send them a response!"
|
| "Ah yes, about that..."
|
| "What is it? Go on..."
|
| "We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is
| probably extinct by now."
|
| _moans_
| nyrikki wrote:
| While I would be happy if these were from extra terrestrial
| beings,IMHO they most likely will be something like further
| examples of Strange non-chotic dynamic systems like RRc Lyrae
| star KIC 5520878 which is also exciting
| consumer451 wrote:
| Here is a timely interview with Dr. Cherry Ng and Peter Ma (co-
| authors of the paper from TFA) on this very topic.
|
| Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots
| of great details here.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs
| mc32 wrote:
| Obviously they can't train this model on known alien signals so
| it seems this would mainly speed up sifting through signals that
| are out of the ordinary (known patterns).
| jojonogo wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > 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
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the
| ground.
| ActionHank wrote:
| They just asked ChatGPT to look /s
| password11 wrote:
| > AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the
| ground.
|
| It's in 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 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 researchers then returned to the telescope to look at
| systems from which all eight signals originated but couldn't
| re-detect them._
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to
| anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-
| random/unnatural signal?
| convolvatron wrote:
| I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried -
| don't really need an AI
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I wonder if the distributed SETI stuff does this.
| junon wrote:
| Yes but then their click scores go down for not having
| buzzwords.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| "To be sure, because they don't have real signals from an
| extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on
| simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note
| that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that
| aren't there.
|
| Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper's co-authors, points out the
| team has a good idea of what to look for.
|
| "A classic example of human-generated technology from space
| that we have detected is the Voyager," said Ng, who studies
| fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with
| the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as
| CNRS.
|
| "Peter's machine learning algorithm is able to generate these
| signals that the aliens may or may not have sent," she said."
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Sounds like a case of assuming ones priors. Of course, should
| we wish to find human space travelers whose SatNav(tm) has
| broken, I'm sure it will prove invaluable.
| varjag wrote:
| A singleton set beats an empty one.
| patientplatypus wrote:
| [dead]
| nl wrote:
| Code for the full pipeline including the autoencoder (and weights
| used) is available: https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI
| BruceEel wrote:
| 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...
| nathias wrote:
| ai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate
| localplume wrote:
| That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the
| AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather
| depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but
| leaving us all behind.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love
| Death + Robots.
| dmix wrote:
| I hadn't seen that yet. Link for the lazy:
| https://www.netflix.com/watch/80223954
| zikduruqe wrote:
| I see you are a cultured individual. :thumbs up:
| BruceEel wrote:
| ...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.
| RajT88 wrote:
| The contrast between that film and _Transcendence_ , which
| came out the following year is the perfect illustration of
| what this article is getting at:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-
| movi...
|
| _Her_ was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi
| movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million
| budget. _Transcendence_ was, basically, a blockbuster which
| really didn 't make you think too hard about the plot. It
| clocked in at around $100 million budget.
| scubakid wrote:
| From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize
| that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the
| ones who designed you were dumber.
| goatlover wrote:
| The android David in the alien prequels Prometheus and
| Covenant has that problem. Which is why he finds the
| xenomorph-goo based life forms more interesting.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| You could say the same about natural evolution. It's a
| genetic algorithm. It even involves the intelligence of the
| species themselves as they pick the fittest mates. Natural
| evolution as an algorithm isn't fully intelligent like us,
| but it is intelligent in some sense of successfully solving
| many optimization problems.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Natural selection is variation, differential
| reproduction, and heredity. A mostly mindless and
| mechanistic process of which fitness and mate selection
| is only a tiny part.
|
| Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate
| selection due to regression to the mean at population
| levels.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Consider that some meaningful part of most people's mind is
| indeed intelligently designed by the people who
| deliberately raised them from birth (generally their
| parents primarily). Our theory of mind, cultural name
| ethical norms, etc. are in many cases the result of
| deliberate design.
|
| Of course, our hardware is mostly not intelligently
| designed, so that would be very different for AGIs. But I
| suspect AGIs would identify much less with the hardware
| their mind is running on than humans do.
| shagie wrote:
| From Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal)
|
| "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.
|
| "Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings,
| earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"
|
| ...
|
| The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko
| glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily
| changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious,
| just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she
| scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot
| waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching
| under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the
| grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work,
| they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it
| without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily.
| "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist
| system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever
| beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother
| had a hand in my wetware, too."
| O__________O wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i'm sure an AI SSL version would be much more efficient
| than 3 round trips. after all, it's supposed to be smarter
| than what we could make, right?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?
| cwkoss wrote:
| _mars attacks aliens_ : Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!
| knowledgepowers wrote:
| "Responded" could be execution of payload.
| mulmen wrote:
| Turns out it is just 18 hours of static.
| O__________O wrote:
| Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety
| measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance
| it contains "alien malware" that attacks systems receiving it?
| whyifwhynot wrote:
| no.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| Ha! Have you read Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia?
| idlewords wrote:
| We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment
| anigbrowl wrote:
| My sensors have detected an _Excession_ enjoyer
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They can do malware given they know how our computers worked
| and means visited us and could do a lot more than make our
| machines mine bitcoins
| lacker wrote:
| No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial
| signals aren't trying to _decode_ signals at all. They are only
| trying to _detect_ extraterrestrial signals. The typical
| resolution for the Green Bank data is something like, every 20
| seconds at a particular frequency gets summarized as one
| floating point number. That 's enough to detect a sufficiently
| powerful signal over a few minutes of recording, but it isn't
| enough to decode any message.
|
| If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require
| constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in
| order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense
| to think about safety measures.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| 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 the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of
| alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind
| of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as
| encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex
| analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a
| point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement
| instructions from said signals, any threats would require
| significant involvement from humans in order to materialize.
|
| At least, those are my initial thoughts.
| edgyquant wrote:
| >it seems unlikely
|
| What are you basing this on?
| wpietri wrote:
| Good point!
|
| There's a bit in one of Larry Niven's books, possibly
| Ringworld. The protagonists are worried about what novel
| aliens might do. Somebody proposes ducking into hyperspace,
| where tracking them is "theoretically impossible". Another
| character responds, "What if they use different theories?"
|
| That something seems unlikely to a human used to dealing
| with other humans at the same or lower technology level to
| me says more about humans than about what's possible.
| groffee wrote:
| Reminds me of an episode of Stargate where they fire
| 'stealth' (invisible to radar) nukes at the Goa'uld
| ships, and they're just stood looking out the window at
| them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBsXxNc7k8
|
| Anyone who says anything like "it's impossible" etc just
| has a complete lack of imagination.
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| Our existing computing platforms are very specific and very
| limited. Without knowledge of that specific design and the
| accompanying limitations, how could you pre-craft a non-
| interactive "exploit" that could be executed by such a
| system? I do think that it becomes more possible if we have
| AGI-like systems doing detection and analysis, but we do
| not. In addition, any universal exploit against AGI systems
| would probably have to be universal enough to also affect
| human intelligence.
| godelski wrote:
| 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).
| edgyquant wrote:
| We are currently discussing exploits designs by foreign
| intelligences to infect artificially intelligent systems.
| We are not talking about privilege escalation on a Mac.
| edgyquant wrote:
| These exploits act on the AI, not the hardware. I'm well
| aware of how human crafted exploits currently work.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| We've built enough stupid complexity* that either the
| aliens must already have spied it out completely (but if
| they done that they could likely overtake is in any way
| quickly..), or it just won't happen. (*) I mean seriously,
| how would you design a virus in some limited signal that
| has a chance of overtaking any arbitrary specific system
| someone may have invented, that's impossible. Never say
| never maybe my imagination is too small..
| edgyquant wrote:
| It would likely be pretty "easy" to design a signal that
| tricks convolutional networks etc. no need to care about
| the underlying hardware
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| A short of 'Contact' scenario. Interesting
| godelski wrote:
| Fun fact, this is basically (highly likely to be) true for
| biological systems as well for very similar reasons. Looking
| at you Orwell...
|
| edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to
| jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even
| higher.
| [deleted]
| jerf wrote:
| 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 truth
| to it.
|
| It's not actually that hard to process data without executing
| it.
|
| Regardless, it is _certainly_ science fiction that they could
| _guess_ an exploit from light years away. That 's not what
| exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen _anything_
| like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at
| _anything_ , even a _non-human system_ , and have some sort of
| reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not
| even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have
| something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-
| payload-list , you're looking at a _human_ list. All I 'd have
| to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a
| parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are
| in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in
| that list would work if all the control characters in
| ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and
| all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's _still_ a very
| human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead
| of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the
| system. There 's an effective infinity of other ways of
| encoding things and deciding what characters have what
| characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even
| the way to look at the representation in the first place.
|
| As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that
| does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if
| nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just
| guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI
| that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than
| something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.
| shsbdncudx wrote:
| Dude, have you even SEEN Independence Day?
| retrac wrote:
| 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 long figured that humans inventing
| superintelligent AI (whatever that would mean) and humans
| receiving an alien signal are essentially the same problem -
| we have no idea what it might tell us.
| skulk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language
|
| I have extreme doubts that we would be able to decode
| something sent by an alien that looks like this.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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. Maybe figure an order of magnitude larger
| number to account for idiosyncrasies in their
| implementation of the language. Running "hello world" a
| half million times shouldn't be too hard. Of course
| figuring out which ones are spitting out gibberish and
| which ones are spitting out perfectly intelligible results
| for one fluent in alienese would be hard. I presume they'd
| send a bunch of example programs that compute pi or
| something similarly universal, but there are a lot of
| potential gibberish we could fit a pattern to. It might
| even make sense to just keep running every code sequence in
| every possible combination until we get something cool.
| jerf wrote:
| Said AI could certainly be programmed to probe for
| weaknesses in its runtime environment.
|
| However... the game theory on that becomes very
| interesting, because the sender can't assume that the AI's
| probes will be immediately successful and they will
| instantly run out and take total control over the host
| network so thoroughly that the hack can't be detected. And
| sending out an AI that tries to break out and then tries to
| do something nasty is an act of war against an adversary
| you know _nothing_ about. For all you know, the psychology
| of that species is such that they will now dedicate every
| erg of energy to the sole task of wiping your species out
| until the threat is gone. For all you know, your AI was
| _first_ executed in an environment that _deliberately_ left
| some big holes in it and those holes were completely set up
| with tripwires. Such is the nature of the virtual world.
| And if the AI does trigger the tripwire, we can also
| analyze it to find out what it "would" do if it broke out.
| So it's definitely not a "ha ha ha we nuked our competitors
| with no risk to ourselves just by sending out a single
| trasmission" situation.
|
| I'm not saying there isn't a whole interesting conversation
| to be had. I am saying the idea that the aliens can somehow
| send out data that is somehow encoded in SuperIntegers that
| instantly SuperHack every computer that you try to SuperUse
| them on... that's a bad computer-animated cartoon for kids,
| not a realistic threat. There is a real threat, but it's
| more complicated and generally smaller, perhaps with a
| super weird spike at the top end, but even then, per my
| previous paragraph, more complicated than I think people
| are thinking here, because the aliens do not have access to
| these SuperIntegers any more than we do.
| goatlover wrote:
| True, game theory makes it less likely a good strategic
| first move, but you can always come up with scenarios
| where a super predatory race has set up the signal a long
| time ago to target nascent space-faring civilizations to
| preempt them. If the newer civ gets past that, then the
| aggressive aliens up the threat level and take more
| drastic action.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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, but then we really don't
| know what the motive of an alien civilization broadcasting a
| signal would be, and the Dark Forest theory hadn't been
| espoused yet.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| What if PHP SQL injection is actually the 10th component of
| The Great Filter [1], and every civilization is condemned,
| sooner or later, to suffer from such a vulnerability.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
| akkartik wrote:
| Focusing on the non-scifi angle here, there's one other
| reason besides C that we end up constantly running data when
| we think we're parsing it: the depth of our computational
| stack.
|
| https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-
| depth-...
|
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098
|
| So I'd say we need 3 things:
|
| * Stop using unsafe languages
|
| * Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just
| follow Lisp, have equivalents for `read` and `eval`. Lua is a
| notable offender here:
| https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-load There is
| no way to parse a table while guaranteeing no code execution.
|
| * Use languages that forbid monkey-patching, because that's
| one vector for turning `read` into `eval` because someone had
| a bright idea.
| rmckayfleming wrote:
| With the caveat that you don't literally follow Lisp by
| having a #. reader macro.
| neilv wrote:
| An alien signal for which the act of _perceiving_ it causes
| some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never
| existed, cascading to every other interaction they 've ever had
| (not had).
|
| It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in
| the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at
| loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten
| the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned
| from previous such incidents).
| 3pac wrote:
| "We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you
| build the receiving end of this matter transporter according
| to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell
| nobody else."
|
| "Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers
| really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while
| they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how
| that makes them the artificial one."
|
| Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.
|
| Seems difficult to defend against.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having
| a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio
| signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false'
| and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they
| are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and
| breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe
| from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb within
| the signal could cause lots of decoding grief. Now that I think
| about it, I can imagine us being stupid enough to dedicate all
| our resources into decompressing or cracking an alien signal to
| up to the point of extinction. And maybe that's when they step
| in and call it. We were just part of a great galactic prank.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >a radio signal can't cause harm.
|
| a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes safety first! Always be sure to measure the power of
| your radio signal, and if it's _greater than the output of
| your galactic core_ , safely move your solar system(s) far
| enough away to avoid damaging your paint job.
| zh3 wrote:
| >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"?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Because it's not so smart, it just try to recognize a set of
| patterns that was trained to look at
| detrites wrote:
| Which is what we do. The rest of what we believe makes us
| special is simply emergent, and arbitrarily defined in terms
| of just being further useful pattern recognition, rather than
| any fundamental property of "intelligence".
| naasking wrote:
| Because the statistical models powering AI don't have the depth
| of understanding of a PhD in this field, and so it casts a wide
| net to ensure nothing gets missed and then a more refined
| search by human heuristics is needed.
| nanidin wrote:
| I think it's useful to replace "AI" with "app" any time you
| encounter it in the wild. AI is a set of computational
| techniques that is very broad. The problem with considering
| "the AI" or "an AI" is that people have in mind some kind of AI
| agent and that isn't really the case.
|
| AI is also not well defined - day one of my AI course in
| university opened with "What is AI?" Generally once we figure
| out how to do something using a computer, we decide that's not
| really intelligent anymore so the implementation isn't AI. An
| example of that is the minimax algorithm - it's featured "AI: A
| Modern Approach"[0] but it isn't really something people think
| of when they hear "an AI".
|
| [0] https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| 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 interesting.
|
| edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a
| random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting
| the definition of what many here are thinking when the term
| "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here
| for marketing purposes.
| nl wrote:
| 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?s
| har...
|
| [2] https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI/blob/4096_pipeline
| /te...
| nyrikki wrote:
| They are talking about ML, which is statistical pattern
| matching and finding.
|
| Godel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century
| ago unless we make significant discoveries in math.
|
| Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated
| reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our
| current constraints are.
|
| We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for
| the foreseeable future unless there is a major development in
| pure math.
|
| Remember we can't even build a logically consistent model of
| arithmetic due to Godel.
| uncletaco wrote:
| Nitpicky and probably universalist or whatever but the fact
| that we can't build a logically consistent model was always
| the case, Godel just discovered it.
| gowld wrote:
| There is nothing human can do that Turing proved a computer
| can't do. Godel ruined the fun of manual theorem testing
| the same way.
| haupt wrote:
| >The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
|
| I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd
| wager almost nobody in the general public really understands
| what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many
| different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to
| refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever
| ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.
| buddhistan wrote:
| No one claimed the AI "is so smart" - it's another tool in
| their kit. The article clearly conveys that the potential is a
| useful way to augment human-led research by providing a way of
| quickly processing large datasets i.e. the 20k signals are
| filtering down 150 terabytes of data which is much more
| manageable for human analysis. It's not like we have definitive
| parameters of what constitutes an "alien signal," so we can't
| exactly create an absolute model for detecting such telemetry.
| Instead the goal of the article is to simply demonstrate
| exciting new ways to leverage machine learning methods in
| different contexts
| nl wrote:
| The others were "intelligent" signals but from human
| interference. There's a lot of this so the unique patterns
| don't occur often enough to automate.
|
| The paper is actually worth reading about this part[1]. They
| have a moderately complex pipeline that you can think of as a
| filter: it tries to find anomalous signals.
|
| The stage-1 autoregressor filtered 115M signals to 3M. Then
| they perform signal processing techniques to remove things like
| GPS signal contamination ("t can be seen that certain observing
| frequencies contain a much higher number of events compared
| with the others--for example, the region around 1,600 MHz. This
| overlaps with known RFI at the GBT site specifically from
| persistent GPS signals.").
|
| After this second stage they are left with 20,515 potential
| signals which were visually inspected.
|
| The issue here is that _we don 't know what a alien signal
| looks like_ so we can't just use a classifier. The pipeline can
| only find things it has never seen before, but it takes human
| judgement to decide if these signals are "alien" or more likely
| contamination from human sources that weren't filtered
| ("Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them
| look like false positives associated with RFI signals.")
|
| [1]
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Because it isn't AI. It is just statistical models. AI is for
| marketing.
| HdS84 wrote:
| Trying to filter noise from data also follows the 80,/20
| principle. The rules for the easy cases is written easily but
| then you have one-offs, maybes and special cases. Trying to
| filter one of these does not cover anything else. So doing it
| manually takes the same time.
|
| Case study: had to clean a list of German addresses once.
| Excluding obviously invalid addresses like some Chinese address
| was easy. But some addresses had errors which needed a human
| eye to fix and correct.
| remarkEon wrote:
| I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a
| pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than
| 20,515.
| zh3 wrote:
| I understand. Still, the point remains that the AI is, in
| this case, clearly inferior to humans (I would have been
| impressed if the humans found 20,515 signatures and the AI
| only - verifably - found eight of them to be worth following
| up).
| groestl wrote:
| > clearly inferior to humans
|
| But maybe we are just proto-AI, running on a different
| platform
| gowld wrote:
| "inferior" is a funny word for "doesn't perfectly
| impersonate us".
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Any 10000s of something is a large number when it involves
| human work.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Imagine that tax returns for millions of people were all
| processed by hand not but a few decades ago.
| umeshunni wrote:
| And that required 1000s of people
| flangola7 wrote:
| SETI@home sorted through I think trillions of data points.
| junon wrote:
| Presumably, because it filtered through orders of magnitude
| more than that.
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