Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/translation-technology-may-let-humans-speak-with-dolphins/

by davidw • 15 years ago

101 61 15 years ago

digitaltrends.com

dolvlo• 15 years ago

Somehow, this made me think of the Baby Translator from the Simpsons

StavrosK3• 15 years ago

Really? Not SeaQuest DSV?

pumpmylemma• 15 years ago

I'll get down-voted -- correctly -- for saying something that adds nothing to the conversation, but YES! I think spending my childhood watching Lucas Walencheck was part of my inspiration to learn programming.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

"What do you want, Maggie?"

Translator: "I want what the dogs eating!"

hugh3• 15 years ago

I prefer the dog translator from the Far Side cartoon.

It turns out every barking dog is saying "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!"

Groxx• 15 years ago

also: Dexter's Lab. "Mooooooooooon!"

AshleysBrain• 15 years ago

Do dolphins have anything interesting to say?

parfe• 15 years ago

Obviously, "So long and thanks for all the fish."

But more importantly communication is the first step towards mutual respect if dolphins are sentient.

ghotli2• 15 years ago

A part of me feels like conscious, sentient beings should have equal protection under the law. Just because they don't encode knowledge in written language or make tools like we do doesn't mean that they may be any less sentient.

blhack• 15 years ago

"Japan, please stop eating us. We are a peaceful people and just want to play."

jmags• 15 years ago

Aren't dolphins notoriously lascivious? They probably have lots of dirty jokes to share.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

If we establish two-way communication (a big if, given the over-promising that goes on with technology), they could probably share a lot of useful information on the condition of the marine environment and fish stocks, with considerable mutual benefit. Then again, if the the quality of the oceanic ecosystems has plunged as much as we suspect, they might be pretty pissed off with us.

majmun• 15 years ago

i guess it will be the same as talking to mentally disabled person.

hvs• 15 years ago

"May" in this case meaning "we haven't actually done any testing yet." Can't anyone wait until they have tested their theory before having an article written about it? This title could just as easily have been "Humans are going to record and play different sounds to dolphins with the hope that something happens."

Goladus• 15 years ago

My guess is that this article will help the project compete for funding. The name of the project (CHAT) and its principle investigators are very prominent in the article, as well as promising descriptions of the technology already developed.

lars• 15 years ago

From a machine learning perspective this doesn't seem like such a daunting task. We have pretty good speech recognition for human language (plus acceptable speech synthesis). Assuming dolphins have a smaller vocabulary than humans, speech recognition of dolphins should strictly speaking be a simpler problem (although it would be significantly harder to record the training data).

sebastianavina• 15 years ago

the difference is to map the vocabulary to the meaning... even writig down the vocabulary is a challenge...

iiiiaiiiiaiiiiiiiiiaiiiIjii... in dolphin that means "WTF" or "Of course"?

pasbesoin3• 15 years ago

I think part of the problem may be context. Without swimming around with them, and having similar senses (something that these days some wearable sensors might mitigate), it may be difficult to grasp what they are talking about.

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

Sure, but we start off already being fluent in the human language we're trying to write software for.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Of if dolphins have a sense of humor all bets are off.

Dophin 1, "Hey I bet we can get that thing to say 'bite me' when it greets someone!"

Dolphin 2, "You think? Ok, every time we meet in front of them you say 'bite me' and i'll say 'wheree?'"

stan_rogers• 15 years ago

Oh, I'm sure there would be a few unfortunate "drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait until lunchtime" incidents, but with an automated Hungarian Phrasebook[1], we'll eventually learn to get by.

More to the point, though, we have no reason to assume that dolphins, any more than, say, apes, have the ability to "chat" -- to communicate about things displaced from the here and now. It's worth a go, of course, but our expectations shouldn't be too high going in.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao

pasbesoin3• 15 years ago

Did anyone see the recently circulating video of the cat on the dock interacting with dolphins. Including repeated and extended nuzzling and no signs of aggression.

I immediate thought that, in part, the dolphins might be attracted by, intrigued by the cat's probably purring, sensing it through their jaws. But there seems to be a patience and curiosity there that speaks to significantly more than mere "animal instinct".

We already communicate with dolphins, and experiments have shown that they can understand the syntax and semantics of request/command structures (the same communication elements in different orders ('sentence structures', so to speak) have different meanings).

What will they say when we finally understand them? "Took you long enough."

loboman• 15 years ago

Thanks for all the fish

bh42222• 15 years ago

What will they say when we finally understand them? "Took you long enough."

I don't believe that communication between dolphins and trainers has been strictly one way. I'm pretty sure a trainer can easily read a lot from a dolphin's actions, sounds, etc.

And keep in mind, the other great apes are wicked smart, like smarter then small human children smart, way smarter then the smartest dog, but still not smart enough to say something like "Took you long enough to teach us sign language."

philwelch• 15 years ago

What they did say was more like this: http://www.koko.org/world/talk_aol.html

StavrosK3• 15 years ago

What does "long enough" mean, in that context? I think it's fair to assume that they don't have a cultural heritage, as we do, and thus no perception of time before they were born.

I agree with you, however, that communication is definitely two-way. Anyone with a dog knows that.

theklub• 15 years ago

Just want to mention that I just watched "The Cove" last night and it was really well done doc. (About Dolphins being mass slaughtered in Japan). Just watch it, its on netflix instant.

evo_9• 15 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynvewVe21Y

pasbesoin3• 15 years ago

I saw a different edit of the same event. From that, I didn't realize it was at a marine theme park. It also didn't include the animals' startled reactions.

Still, interesting. And goes to show, cats are real charmers -- when they want to be. ;-)

bitwize2• 15 years ago

What will they say when we finally understand them?

"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"

yannski• 15 years ago

So finally David Brin could be premonitory, cf http://www.davidbrin.com/upliftbooks.htm

adavies42• 15 years ago

that's one down. next up: world hunger, then the warrior robot race.

siiily2• 15 years ago

That's good news for dolphins, they must be willing to read news.ycombinator.com, first thing they can do is create their own version of fb.

VladRussian5• 15 years ago

may be they went into the ocean to avoid the future of creating fb

siiily2• 15 years ago

As dolphins hearing or seeing system is 3D their mind is very different from ours. Before trying to communicate we should be able to imagine what kind of society we could construct with this 3D sensor system.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

How can you write an article about talking with dolphins without linking to at least one John C. Lilly interview?

http://www.futurehi.net/docs/Here_To_Alternity.html

http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/lilly_john/lilly_jo...

VladRussian5• 15 years ago

every small step toward recognizing intelligence of others is a great leap for humanity. I think before human species is able to move any further in its development, the first step it must to make is to step out of the "i'm the top of the God's creation" closet.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discove... :

---------------

So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.

He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer's shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, 'Here comes the tall human in the blue,' versus, 'Here comes the short human in the yellow,' " says Slobodchikoff.

Amazingly, it doesn't stop there. Slobodchikoff's next move was to see if prairie dogs could differentiate between abstract shapes. So he and his students built two wooden towers on each side of a prairie dog village. They then made cardboard cutouts of circles, squares and triangles and ran them out along a wire strung between the two towers, so the shapes sort of floated through the village about three feet from the ground. And the prairie dogs, Slobodchikoff found, were able to tell the difference between the triangle and the circle, but, alas, they made no mention of the difference between the square and the circle.

---------------------

I wonder how aliens analyze our intelligence:

- sent round blue flying saucer - a lot of buzz

- sent stick-looking device http://abcnews.go.com/International/ufo-china-closes-airport... - a lot of the same buzz.

Conclusion: probably the humans can't distinguish the abstract shapes.

grantismo• 15 years ago

I would expect aliens capable of interstellar travel would have better metrics than "buzz" :]

VladRussian5• 15 years ago

of course, they would be looking for fine structured mental field waveforms that they would expect us, like any sentient species, to naturally produce ... and i guess they are still waiting for us to generate the waveforms

rokhayakebe2• 15 years ago

the first step it must to make is to step out of the "i'm the top of the God's creation" closet

I want to give you 100 of my own karma points. I just do not know where this believe that we are better comes from. [This is totally hypocritical coming from me since I eat meat. Nevertheless]

VladRussian5• 15 years ago

thank you, i appreciate it :). In my understanding, meat eating is just a stage in the species development. I.e. eating meat, as a more efficient energy source, allowed a bunch of species move to the state of mental development we can observe among the advanced predators, ie. likes of wolves, cats, apes/humans, etc...

I think humans have exhausted how far the _extensive_ (ie. size increasing) brain development of meat eating species can go - it seems we're near the biomechanical limits - the brain consumes ~25% of our body energy. The further development seems to require to "shrink the die" of our brain and/or increase/improving of the energy intake.

"Shrinking the die" is biological evolutionary process that will take time on the scale of several generations at least (Einstein's brain, smaller, yet more densely packed and having more energy generating cells than the average human's brain, shows that it is a viable, in principle, option)

Wrt. improving of the energy intake - i think we're on the brink (ie. in the next few decades) of bio-engineering of the meat-comparable and, this is much more important, more effective-than-meat energy carrying and generating proteins (or whatever compounds it will result in) for human consumption, and in result - move of the humans past the meat (as meat eating would be an artificial dumbing down of yourself) and we'll see the world in the new light. Meat consumption would become just an ugly habit of the past, like torturous executions (ie. burning at stake, disemboweling, quartering...) that were an enjoyable public spectacle just few hundreds years ago.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

side-question: what does eating meat have to do with thinking you're better than other kinds of creatures?

Do lions think they're better? Dogs? Raccoons? Barracuda? Dolphin? Seal? Any-other-carnivore/omnivore

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

That UFO looks like a fucking spotlight pointed at clouds.

Go home, UFOs. We're yet too dumb for you.

Lost_BiomedE• 15 years ago

One documentary on netflix had a couple training dolphins. They used signs to tell the dolphin to do different tricks. At the end of their training the dolphin had to invent a new trick. They then had two dolphins do the tricks together. At the end of the training, they asked the dolphins to do a new trick, and the dolphins would coordinate a brand new trick together on the fly and perform it simultaneously!

Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins

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