Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins

"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."

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... :

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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.

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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.

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."

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!

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...

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

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).

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.

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.

Do dolphins have anything interesting to say?

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

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