Here's a tough one. I ignored my rumblings of violated ethics, paid my cash, and got to swim with some. For a guy who wants proof of everything, all I can tell you is that looking at them, I knew their intelligence. It was there in their eyes somehow. They looked at things with much more brains than a clever dog.

But then, if they are sooo intelligent, why do hundreds of them allow themselves to be slaughtered every year, especially by the Japanese?

We have proof enough to understand that their sounds denote communication; likely a form of 3D imaging. We have a pain-in-the-ass but effective software, BOINC that could be alloted to try and figure out what they are saying.

What algorithms are you going to plug in? Does anyone know how this can be treated? I would like to start a program for this, if there isn't already one in the works. (Guess I need to look up what's going on).

In the meantime, if it turns out we can eventually communicate with them on their terms, wouldn't the implications be staggering? And wouldn't the implications of how humans react to that info, and change or retain their behaviors reveal our basic nature? (I guarantee it will be selfish - we know great apes have a very deep emotional and perceptive life, yet we do almost nothing to protect them!)

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

But then, if they are sooo intelligent, why do hundreds of them allow themselves to be slaughtered every year, especially by the Japanese?

I guess you could ask the same of all the inteligent humans who allow themselves to be murdered every year....

Intelligence can only get you so far I suppose.

Robert

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Here's a tough one. I ignored my rumblings of violated ethics, paid my cash, and got to swim with some. For a guy who wants proof of everything, all I can tell you is that looking at them, I knew their intelligence. It was there in their eyes somehow. They looked at things with much more brains than a clever dog.

But then, if they are sooo intelligent, why do hundreds of them allow themselves to be slaughtered every year, especially by the Japanese?

We have proof enough to understand that their sounds denote communication; likely a form of 3D imaging. We have a pain-in-the-ass but effective software, BOINC that could be alloted to try and figure out what they are saying.

What algorithms are you going to plug in? Does anyone know how this can be treated? I would like to start a program for this, if there isn't already one in the works. (Guess I need to look up what's going on).

In the meantime, if it turns out we can eventually communicate with them on their terms, wouldn't the implications be staggering? And wouldn't the implications of how humans react to that info, and change or retain their behaviors reveal our basic nature? (I guarantee it will be selfish - we know great apes have a very deep emotional and perceptive life, yet we do almost nothing to protect them!)

Perhaps from the Dolphins perspective, we are the aliens. We abduct them, run tests on them and return them to the wild. There seem to be nice aliens (humans) and not so nice aliens....

We can travel great distances rapidly over land, air (which could be considered outer space from the dolphins point of view). We have superior technology....

or maybe Douglas Adams got it right.....

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Belief gets in the way of learning

Like the air is simply the first level of space. Maybe they are monitoring our radio transmissions and the reason they do tricks is because they want to be the next (famous) flipper. Maybe we should attempt to monitor for dolphin transmissions.

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TEAM
LL

We have proof enough to understand that their sounds denote communication; likely a form of 3D imaging. We have a pain-in-the-ass but effective software, BOINC that could be alloted to try and figure out what they are saying.

What algorithms are you going to plug in? Does anyone know how this can be treated? I would like to start a program for this, if there isn't already one in the works. (Guess I need to look up what's going on).

In the meantime, if it turns out we can eventually communicate with them on their terms, wouldn't the implications be staggering?

Really good idea. Just as we only know of one planet with life, we only know one way of communicating with speech between individuals.

Dolphins are apparently the only animals that are intelligent enough to resemble the aliens SETI looks for. If we understood their speech it would give us another view of how complex communication can operate, regardless of how it gets broadcast.

BOINC seems like the ideal way to explore dolphin communication. There are plenty of researchers who study dolphins, record their sounds and try to understand them. They should know how to approach a software project like that.

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OK, so where are those researchers?


(P.S. - you can just make out one of the dolphins behind me in my avatar pic. They were soooo nicely trained to do tricks for the affluent human. They should have butted the frack out of me. I deserve it for supporting their captivity. They were kept in a large pen out in the ocean, with walls high enough so they couldn't jump out.)

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

OK, so where are those researchers?

Maybe there : http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/delphis/

BOINC seems like the ideal way to explore dolphin communication. There are plenty of researchers who study dolphins, record their sounds and try to understand them. They should know how to approach a software project like that.

I'm not so sure BOINC could handle this mission, no more than it could handle understanding a pre-linguistic childs speech. Now before I get bitched at about how a dolphin is probably smarter (or atleast more proficient at speaking), the comparison isn't about intelligence. It's about how different there worlds are from ours (I happen to believe communication has a lot to do with how you observe the world).

Assuming dolphins are highly intelligent, syncing the observations (about the only way to decode their language) just becomes that much harder. Smarter creatures are harder to manipulate into saying what you want. Imagine if you had to learn a language by observing surgeons in the operating room. It's an almost impossible task, they could just as easily be talking about their plans for the weekend (or that smoking hot blond they hooked up with the night before), as talking about what they are actually doing. Assuming any less of dolphins, is grossly limiting their possible intelligence (and yet that is about as far as we can go right now).

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Still looking for something profound or inspirational to place here.

Well, why not just try from first principles? A trusted trainer needs to get a few items, present it to his dolphin buddy, say 'ball', show it to him, and record the volcalizations the dolphin makes. Try to cross-reference it with other dolphins, and slowly slowly work out a vocabulary. Otherwise, put those volcalizations for each object through the computer, and see if the computer can detect and work out the similarities in a 3D sonar representation of each object corresponding to the recordings of several individuals on different days.

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

Chuck I don't claim any special knowledge, and I cannot say such a set-up won't work. But that seems so rudimentary, that it must have been tried. Fairly simple pattern recognition software should be able to handle that (the target "word" would be known).

Now it could be that attempts have failed to account for enough timeshift, don't have large enough social groupings (per instance), or simple have lacked the repeated attempts necesary. These are options that I have no knowledge of the experiments to say are true or false.

Perhaps it would work, maybe analyzing thousands of hours of recordings could yield a phrase book ("words" we don't know the definition to). That itself could go a long way to helping direct observation (stimulus/ reaction) analysis. That I can see working as a BOINC project, so I was a bit hasty in my dismissal (hey, I'll admit when I'm wrong, which is fairly often).

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Still looking for something profound or inspirational to place here.

Well...assuming TV to have actually presented something with truth and integrety, a pair of dolphins were given the signal to create their own trick - they went down to the bottom of the pool for a minute or two, and then both did the exact same thing at the exact same time. So there has to be communication going on between them - assuming the TV show/trainer wasn't lying, which could easily be possible.

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

I remember seeing that as well. Totally awesome.

I got to swim with wild dolphins at a beach 1hr from Melbourne in March. The dolphins were cruising the beach about 50m off shore and when they came across a group of children paddling in the water they came in to within 10m of the children and made themselves known by splashing their tails in the water and lifting their heads out to get a better look at the kids. The older kids then quickly put their fins and snorkles on and went for a swim with them. A few adults also got into the act once we saw what was going on. There were only 3 dolphins which appeared to be a small family group - 2 larger ones and a smaller one. It seemed as though the larger ones were encouraging the smaller one to swim with the children.

The next day a lone dolphin swam along the same part of the beach and I raced into the water splashed around and got its attention. It swam over to within 1m of me and checked me out. Since I had stopped splashing around and was checking it out it appeared to get bored with me just floating there looking at it while it looked at me and slowly swam off down the beach to check out the splashing occuring further down the beach. While the dolphin was close to me and I had my head underwater I could hear its "sonar" going in a slower fashion than I have previously heard of recordings of their vocalisations.

I tend to agree with Chuck that there has to be commonalities within a pod on the sounds they make. They will have their dialects and in different locations they will have different sounds for the same things. I'm sure there is marine-biologists who have a thing for computers who has already looked into this. In fact a quick google search on dolphin vocalisation analysis turned up this link on a 1997 paper. Obviously a lot has changed since then.

Live long and crunch.

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Paul
(S@H1 8888)
And proud of it!

I surfed with dolphins once, many years ago. Also at Sea World or somewhere (not sure where it was), there was a pool of dolphins where they swam just out of the reach of reaching children. I put my hands together the way you would to make squishing/farting noises and did that underwater at the edge of the pol. When I did, they dolphins made a semi-circle around me at the edge of the pool. When all the kids saw this, they all ran over and started jabbing at the dolphins and they all swam off. I wonder if I actually said anything to the dolphins or if I just sounded interesting or like a sick dolphin?

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TEAM
LL

Neat abstract! I should love to read the article!

Think I'll do a little more research into this in the coming days when I can find the time...

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

when I can find the time...

Who are you trying to kid... You've got nothing but time... ;)

when I can find the time...

Who are you trying to kid... You've got nothing but time... ;)

Normally I just sit here and lurk, Jeffrey why is it that without fail it seems you try to antagonize Chuck? He has started a rather interesting, if very theoretical post about the intelligence of Porpoises and you seem to have for no reason personally attacked him. Why not try adding something productive to the conversation for once.

Back on topic:

I always thought that the first season of SeaQuest in 1993 that showed a software run translation tool used by the cast to communicate with one of these very intelligent mammals was an interesting idea and had hoped that by the year 2010 (about the time SeaQuest was said to have taken place) we would have something similar. Good post Chuck.

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I hope someone will wander in here that has a lot of experience in this subject.

So jeffrey. Since you appear to have time to write in here too, have you picked up that copy of "Oasis in Space"? Since you said you wanted proof of the age of Earth? Or were you lying to me?

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Never Forget a Friend. Or an Enemy.

Jeffrey why is it that without fail it seems you try to antagonize Chuck?

Surely you jest... ;)

'Mind of the Dolphin' (a non-human intelligence) . . .
"They" do have more 'common-sense' than we humans though
and their brains have quite a larger 'mass' . . .

deal halt ;_)))

anybody interested in Dolphin Research (per se)