Will humans ever learn to speak whale?:
Sperm whales are among the loudest living animals on the planet, producing creaking, knocking and staccato clicking sounds to communicate with other whales that are a few feet to even a few hundred miles away.
This symphony of patterned clicks, known as codas, might be sophisticated enough to qualify as a full-fledged language. But will humans ever understand what these cetaceans are saying?
The answer is maybe, but first researchers have to collect and analyze an unprecedented number of sperm whale communications, researchers told Live Science.
With brains six times larger than ours, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have intricate social structures and spend much of their time socializing and exchanging codas. These messages can be as brief as 10 seconds, or last over half an hour.
[...] This paper, by a cross-disciplinary project known as CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), outlines a plan to decode sperm whale vocalizations, first by collecting recordings of sperm whales, and then by using machine learning to try to decode the sequences of clicks these fellow mammals use to communicate. CETI chose to study sperm whales over other whales because their clicks have an almost Morse code-like structure, which artificial intelligence (AI) might have an easier time analyzing.
Pratyusha Sharma, a data science researcher for CETI and a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, told Live Science more about recent developments in artificial intelligence and language models, such as GPT-3, which uses deep learning to construct human-like text or stories on command, and last year took the AI community by storm. Scientists hope these same methods could be applied to the vocalizations of sperm whales, she said. The only problem: these methods have a voracious appetite for data.
The CETI project currently has recordings of about 100,000 sperm whale clicks, painstakingly gathered by marine biologists over many years, but the machine-learning algorithms might need somewhere in the vicinity of 4 billion. To bridge this gap, CETI is setting up numerous automated channels for collecting recordings from sperm whales. These include underwater microphones placed in waters frequented by sperm whales, microphones that can be dropped by eagle-eyed airborne drones as soon as they spot a pod of sperm whales congregating at the surface, and even robotic fish that can follow and listen to whales unobtrusively from a distance.
And even with the data, the AI model could be pro-human biased. Maybe it is time we find Dory.
Journal Reference:
Shane Gero, Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell. Individual, unit and vocal clan level identity cues in sperm whale codas, Royal Society Open Science (DOI: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.150372)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @01:48AM
You hoomans too dumb belgians.
Thanks for the fish, though.
Say hi to the borgs for us.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @01:50AM (1 child)
Perhaps our cetacean friends will be receptive to Aristarchus' blubber?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:07AM
Go away, Runaway!
(Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:32AM (1 child)
Considering all those New Age type records with Whale sounds that are supposed to be relaxing one would have thought we would have picked this up already.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:52AM
Those are Humpbacks, who do sonatas and arias, not Sperm Whales, who do the codas and tocattas. Learn you genres of music, or you will never be able to speak whale. Notice Country-Western Whale is not even on the chart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:38AM (14 children)
From tfa it sounds like the researchers are looking for *a* translation. My guess is that the whales have regional dialects, just like any other primitive society.
I've heard that while the Chinese have a fairly common written language, the spoken language varies widely across the country. For that matter, I can understand some people from England, but (coming from whitebread USA), there are many regional English accents and vocabularies that I can't understand at all.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:07AM (9 children)
A Chinese-born friend has written about meeting people from her birth country and having to sit around the table texting each other because their spoken language was mutually incomprehensible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:15AM (8 children)
The Chinese call these different "dialects" of the one Chinese language, but this is just nationalistic propaganda. Any linguist would classify them as different (but related) languages.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:59AM (6 children)
Q: What's the difference between a language and a dialect?
A: An army.
Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, and Portuguese and Spanish are almost mutually intelligible (probably closer than Cornish is to mainstream English). Meanwhile different dialects of Chinese are not, although of course they are related, much the way European Romance languages are related.
Taiwan still speaks Chinese because everyone is desperate to pretend it's not a separate country, just like the USA still spoke English even after it upgraded from colonies to states, because they were still culturally English even though they had enough of English politics.
Having your own language is mostly a matter of wanting to say you have your own language, and nobody else being able to stop you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:32AM (4 children)
Esperanto?
Eubonics?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @05:07AM (3 children)
Esperanto is a constructed language that hardly anyone actually speaks, like Klingon. There might be more Klingon speakers. But it's a real language because it isn't mutually intelligible with anything.
Ebonics (or as it is properly known, African-American Vernacular English or AAVE) is a dialect, because it's both mutually intelligible with mainstream American English and because, despite the best efforts of the wokester new segregationists, black is not a separate country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @10:33AM (2 children)
Esperanto was constructed purely from European languages, so its ambition for becoming an international language was doomed from the start.
For comparison, real-life creole languages seeing real-life use look like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:10PM (1 child)
Well, there are also Ido and Loglan, etc. None are as successful as Esperanto, however. Not all constructed languages limit themselves to European languages, though all I'm familiar with are based around Nostratic languages. This, however, probably says more about what I'm familiar with than it does about the languages.
OTOH, what about Fortran, C++, Python, etc? There are considered special-purpose languages, but nobody tries to call them dialects, or anything besides languages. No army needed.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:20PM
Computer languages aren't languages in the same sense, because they can't express the same range of concepts. I've heard musings that if you had a computer language with the same expressiveness as a natural language, you'd have a sentient computer.
But they do have dialects all the same. Python 2 vs Python 3, Perl 5 vs Perl 6, or any of the various versions of BASIC from the 80s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:54AM
Yeah, right! Good luck getting either of them to admit it! It is like American TV putting subtitles under anyone with a slight accent. We cannot admit that other countries might speak American!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:15PM
Written Cantonese and written Mandarin are dialects. But spoken Cantonese and spoken Mandarin are different languages.
Written Chinese probably made it easier for different provinces to communicate (reports, tax status, etc) with "HQ" in the same written language despite all of them speaking different languages.
You can probably write broken English in written Chinese.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bart9h on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:19AM (3 children)
don't whales travel a lot around the globe?
maybe their world is way smaller than ours, and so the dialect effect could be way less important
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:30AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Vocalization_complex [wikipedia.org]
> ... A coda is a short pattern of 3 to 20 clicks that is used in social situations. They were once thought to be a way by which individuals identified themselves, but individuals have been observed producing multiple codas, and the same codas are used by multiple individuals.[129] However, each click contains a physical signature which suggests that clicks can be used to identify individuals.[90] Geographically separate pods exhibit distinct dialects.[130]...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:37AM
Many (most?) species do. Though I don't know how many actually circle continents - I think it's mostly a seasonal north-south migration, so I don't think, e.g., the Atlantic and Pacific populations of most whales encounter each other often.
Within the same ocean though, not only to most travel long distances over the course of a year, but the fact that they can converse across hundreds of miles no doubt shrinks the world dramatically. Sure, modern technology allows humans to talk to each other basically anywhere, but that didn't happen until long after all the cultural and language divides had happened. Without technology, and not counting things like highland whistle-speech, humans can usefully communicate with someone what, maybe a a few tenths of a mile away under optimal conditions? Around 1/1000th the distance that (some) whales can converse across. That kind of conversational range means that the "conversational distance" across the entire 6,000 mile width of the Atlantic ocean shrinks to the human equivalent of about 6miles. Just chatting with their "neighbors" would probably eliminate most dialect drift, even if they didn't travel at all.
And of course, they've likely been able to do that for far longer than anything remotely human has existed.Give humanity 10 million years of ubiquitous cell phones and I suspect our languages will gradually borrow more and more from each other until eventually there's only one common language. At least with regards to region - I still could see contextual dialects forming such as "common" versus "technicalese", that are optimized for different kinds of communication. We already see some of that today, with words having acquired very different definitions in a technical context, and even language patterns changing in the interest of conveying extremely precise information without the layers of ambiguity that enrich everyday language.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:58AM
They migrate, but they still have distinct populations with differences in the vocalizations. No one knows if this is actually a different language or just a variation, in the way that some birds have variations in their vocalizations.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:39AM (9 children)
They're probably either saying "There's food here" or "I'm horny as fuck: come see what I have between my fins."
Most animal communicate variations of those two themes, because they're animals: for them to communicate something else, such as their inner thoughts on global warming or the trillionth decimal of Pi, they would have to have 1/ a brain capable of handling those concepts and 2/ a good reason to communicate them, neither of which they possess.
That's something scientists who claim they discovered some really complex grammar in animal languages always seem to forget for some reason.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:55AM (2 children)
We have some ideas from the Sacred Text, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Maximal Improbability Drive turns a missile into a Sperm Whale, which not being in its normal habitat, begins to plummet toward the planet's surface.
Second hand, from Psychology Today [psychologytoday.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:08AM (1 child)
> Maximal Improbability Drive
Infinite Improbability Drive
ftfy
> The Infinite Improbability Drive was a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without "tedious mucking about in hyperspace."
>
> It was discovered by lucky chance and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's research centre on Dick. As soon as the drive reaches infinite Improbability, it passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe simultaneously. An incredible range of highly improbable things can happen due to these effects.
For example, aristarchus can make a mistake. Yes, it does happen(grin).
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:31AM
Given the Infinite Improbability Drive, it is necessary (Modal logic □, then modal logic ◇) that Maximal Improbability would coincide with the Infinite, except in modal logic domains without necessity. Which is of course impossible. Thus, the Whale.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:11AM (1 child)
Also they're social animals so it's conceivable that conversations like "Did you hear what she said about you?!" and "I enjoy your company" might happen.
Lions manage "I'm hungry", "I'm horny", and "Stay off my lawn" without 45-minute transmissions. Whales may be doing something different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @07:36AM
Lions have done STEM. Sperm whales did social science.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday June 15 2021, @05:25AM
That's kind of the point though:
- Whales have complex social structures and engage in complex collaboration on a large number of activities - they have plenty of good reasons to communicate relatively complex concepts.
- Whale's have extremely large and complicated brains. In fact they're far larger* and more complicated than humans (*by either mass, or neuron or synapse count, and it doesn't take any more neurons to move a big muscle than a small one) The the whole brain/body ratio thing is only a decent first-order estimate for intelligence when comparing closely-related species - e.g. different primates or different rodents, but not comparing primates to rodents,
- Information analysis of whale vocalizations show that they have a far higher complexity (= essentially linguistic "bit rate" assuming optimal compression) than those of any other animal except humans. They're not on par with typical human speech (virtually all human languages have roughly the same "bit rate", with fast-spoken languages carrying less information per syllable), but I want to say they've got a "Dick and Jane" style book beat.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday June 15 2021, @08:16AM (1 child)
With brains six times the size of ours, they probably have enough sense not to talk to us.
Alternatively, since we are all at sea:
"Left hand down a bit, Mr Pertwee"
"aye aye, sir" ...
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @11:54AM
To figure out what they are saying, the first step is to recognize some structure in the sounds.
(Like words and phrases that show up in many different contexts in english.)
But then you have to correlate these repeating things to what they are thinking.
How do you do that?
The article said they have 100k uterances, but didn't say anything about having the context in which each happened.
Given that, not sure how you would find an entry into their thoughts.
It would be alot easier if they could get the whales to cooperate.
Perhaps this is the first step. Get the computer to send and receive the utterances between a whale and human.
Then see if you can get a whale interested in participating with the gadget between the human and the whale.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:16PM
Your comment about the brain of the sperm whale is not based on evidence. I'll agree about what they're probably usually saying, but we've little reason to believe they aren't quite intelligent. Possibly considerably more so than an elephant. It just lacks the ability to manipulate things.
For that matter, it could be more intelligent than any human that ever lived, and we still wouldn't know. It probably isn't, because intelligence without the ability to manipulate your environment is of limited utility, but certainty isn't reasonable. Perhaps their intelligence just automatically scaled up as they got larger.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:03AM (1 child)
n/t
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @03:11AM
no way, no how, no whale
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Tuesday June 15 2021, @05:33AM (3 children)
If you want to speak to Whales, you need to talk in Whelsh.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:58AM (2 children)
Are you suggesting that whales sing sea chanties? [cardiffjournalism.co.uk]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 15 2021, @01:34PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday June 16 2021, @05:59PM
Whatever they sing, it'll be in four-voice harmony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @10:32AM
That's done already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJGeeryk0Eo [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @11:32AM
Just checked and english-to-whale is a supported language pair.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:48PM
There is an elephant language database but it is highly dependent on coordinated body movements.
https://www.elephantvoices.org/component/tags/tag/elephant-sound-database.html [elephantvoices.org]
The whales are too big and distant for body movements to add anything to the communication meaning the sound alone contains all the information. Perfect setup for AI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:06PM
For whales and dolphins I'm going to guess that quite a number of "words" are going to be what the stuff "looks" like to them via their "sonar" and/or the sounds they make. So some "words" might not be that consistent because two fish of the same type could "look"/"sound" different. ;)
I'm sure the researchers would consider that angle as a possibility right?
Imagine if your phones/google glasses had a seamless UI so you could just immediately send a snip (not all you see but the relevant part) of whatever you're looking at to a friend.
So what you bunch say could look like: "Hey, check this out [image]", "Whoa! [image]".
Maybe some of them would be like those communicating with memes? ;)