Happy Thought for 14 June 2024

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

We’re learning that sperm whales might have a whole language. Not just a few words, but a complex, intricate communication.

 

This is one of the really cool things that machine learning (one of the aspects of what is being branded “AI”) has been used for. Scientists took a whole bunch of recordings of sperm whale songs, and broke them up into distinct “codas”.

 

They then took these 9000+ codas, and fed them through some machine learning algorithms to see how the whales were using them. Turns out, each coda might be roughly equivalent to a phenome (the audio equivalent of a letter), or maybe a word. They’re combined in different orders (pat vs tap), lengths (tap vs tapdancing), and even potentially adding ornamental noises (ahem). And the codas are used in all sorts of changing ways, so each whale is using all sorts of codas, in different ways - not just singing a repetitive “song”.

 

In other words (heh): it sounds a lot like a language.

 

The authors of the study explain this in a short video, in case you need to hear these clicks and codas in action.

 

We’re many many steps away from interpreting any such language, but it’s still a really cool leap forward in our understanding!

 

 

Maybe eventually we’ll learn the languages of other ocean-going species. In fact, there’s an organisation focused on this, and they’re called Project CETI.

This makes me very happy – a great reference to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and also to the fact that whales and dolphins are cetaceans.

 

 

I’m thinking the next language we might want to learn is Orca. So that maybe we can find out why it is they’ve been attacking so many boats in the Mediterranean.

Unless it really is just a group of bored teenagers…

 

 

Read the article about how machine learning is being used to break down sperm whale language:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8

  


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