Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale

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78 pointsaforelight44 comments

how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.

Terrible article.

The crucial info that's missing from the article is that they used AI to translate whale language to human, and then from human to whale again.

So there was, in fact, a conversation, mediated by AI; a lot like using Google Translate to talk to a whale.

Wait for a better article on it.

The paper is linked in the article:

https://peerj.com/articles/16349/ (also has a PDF download)

Ah woops I posted this in the main thread before I saw this comment, thanks

Thank you, I was really hoping this was the case, this is a pet topic of interest of mine.

A pet whale topic?

interestingly, it puts us in a room adjacent to that of a famous thought experiment from philosophy, John Searle's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

It seems to be the "conversation" part, not necessarily "communication", one of the early stages in children's language acquisition is teaching the flow of back and forth responses and pausing for the other to speak: which seems to be what they're indicating in this article.

I read the article and can't come up with a way it is any different from you meowing back and forth with a cat.

This experiment teaches us basically nothing and has no bearing on talking to extraterrestrials. I can't believe it was written up this way.

This experiment? You didn't read the paper about the experiment.

Blame the crappy article, not the science, experiment or paper.

Read the "Results and Discussion" section of the actual paper[1] and tell me how it wouldn't apply to someone meowing to their cat. The authors even use the word "conversing" (in quotes), so the paper itself and the write-up posted here seem to be in agreement that this experiment should be wildly overblown.

This isn't bad science, but it's not exciting or any kind of breakthrough. It's some preliminary work that might lead to something more interesting in the future. It seems that the authors were desperate to make it seem more important than it was.

1. https://peerj.com/articles/16349/

It’s interesting for sure but ‘conversation’ seems like an oversell here. That implies some sort of exchange of information at the least which doesn’t seem like what happened?

I’m extremely interested as well but the article talks about so much other stuff than the headline. In decades of whale communication research no one has thought to play whale sounds at whales to see what happened, or is this just the first time one has responded? What does “matching intervals” mean? He matched their greeting, I’m meant to assume, which I guess could qualify as “conversation” but the researchers still don’t really know what information was exchanged, right?

Simply matching a greeting is a lot of information. It conveys shared context, it conveys an acknowledgement by the party doing the matching that the party doing the original communication was recognized and understood, it conveys an acceptance by the matcher of the possibility of further interchange, and so on.

The fury at this article in the comments is puzzling to me

> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.

Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we are as a species.

What's really wild is how impenetrable animal languages are. We know they exist and have studied them for decades but they are still utterly opaque. I think this really shows how hard inter-species communication is. We even struggle to translate ancient human languages and we share the same mental architecture. Animal or alien languages are really going to stretch our minds to comprehend.

Yeah, sure. We're the only entitled species. Do they have cats where you're from?

The tendency of the scientific community to cling to ignorant and clearly false notions about the intelligence of animals just baffles me. Its maliciously dissonant.

Did your cat tell you its name?

I’m missing how this is groundbreaking or even a “conversation”.

They played audio recordings of other whales to the whale and it replied the way whales reply to one another.

The scientists didn’t know what they were saying, other than since the target whale appeared to stick around it probably wasn’t completely gibberish.

Whether this is groundbreaking or not depends on what the whale thought of it.

If it got the notion that humans are now actually trying to talk to it in its language, I'd call that a win.

Well said. It seems they got it excited, but what seems to us as exciting might be them being confused and dumbfounded. Or even laughing or mocking us.

> If it got the notion

To me, it seems like precisely this part got lost in translation

Did you watch Arrival or read "Story of Your Life"?

We're still in Act I. Have some popcorn and enjoy the show.

"In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.

So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?

But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods."

-- Douglas Adams

Economic progress trumps all, even magical whale songs that span whole worlds.

Does anyone have a link to the actual “conversation”? Is there a transcript?

The first part of the transcript was "Hoooow aaarrrreeee youuu dooooing? IIIIII'mmmm aaaaa sciiiientiiiist." :-p

Weeee'reeeeee looooookkiiiiingggg foooooor Syyyyyyydneeeeeeeeeey

Paper linked above https://peerj.com/articles/16349/ links to .wav sound files in the Data Availability section https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ht76hd... and 20 minute .mp4 files https://zenodo.org/records/8247515 (and R code in a PDF) and a "Timeline of Interaction" PDF. Seems that's the closest to a "transcript".

the article reads like a press release talking about how innovative and exciting their product is for dozens of paragraphs, but never actually giving details about what the product is

Sometimes I play random YouTube budgie sounds to my real budgies who promptly respond in a similar way. This sounds like the same except the animal is longer than 4 inches long?

Probably worth pointing out that the budgie thing is also an interesting and noteworthy example, if you're trying to suggest this is commonplace you should reconsider

Its not a conversation it's a "conversation"

It is shockingly badly reported.

For example, they didn't ask the whale it's name, this is what scientists have labelled it.

So what did the whale say? Shut off your bloody engines, I can't even hear my thoughts?

One step closer to Seaquest DSV.

Which was one step derived from the dolphin in Johnny Mneumonic!

Johnny Pneumonic, the little-known Kafka-esque Gibson follow up in which a data courier's internal systems get a virus and he lives out his life in suffering, fully convinced that he himself is an embodiment of poor software/hardware implementations; a "bug", if you will.

Ask what they think of Biden and trump the whale responded..

Good lord this article and others about it are terrible, here is the source text everything seems to be drawing from:

https://peerj.com/articles/16349/

> Here we report on a rare and opportunistic acoustic turn-taking with an adult female humpback whale, known as Twain, in Southeast Alaska. Post hoc acoustic and statistical analyses of a 20-min acoustic exchange between the broadcast of a recorded contact call, known as a ‘whup/throp’, with call responses by Twain revealed an intentional human-whale acoustic (and behavioral) interaction.

Re-wording this in less-technical language, and including excerpts from the lead researchers didn’t make the article less informative, in my opinion.

I wonder where this whale Twain got its name? assuming the whale-namers named a bunch of whales (at once or over time) it's really appropriate that this particular whale participated in this particular landmark conversation.

One of the most popular, distinctly-American authors of all time, humorist Samuel Clemens, wrote under the pen-name "Mark Twain". He was very skilled in his use of language for communicating his musings, and the "sound" of Twain's phraseology is quite pleasing.

his pen-name comes from the phrase "mark twain" which was shouted by sailors on riverboats as part of their measuring the depth of the water, mark twain (2) referred to 2 fathoms (12 feet, 4 meters-ish but it was measured with a weighted stretch of rope, so is "twine" a stretch?)

Measuring the depth of water is alternatively called "sounding", and not even because of sonar, but because nautically speaking a sound is also the name for a small but deep enough to be navigable body of water. Whales dive into the depths of water, and that is also called the whale sounding.

But of course, this communication is using the audible sounds of whale vocalization. A connection between two parties communicating could be called "where the twain (2) shall meet". or if it's groundbreakingly successful moving forward, e'er the twain shall meet. (compare "ne'er the twain shall meet")

I can't imagine all these literary allusions were part of the naming decision, unless she/he was named as part of the experiment, so I think it's just a fun sequence of collisions.

Thank you for writing that up. Connecting knowledge through words and wordplay is a real treat.

> an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales.

I realise they can only work with what they have but I'm not sure how much a whale's behaviour can tell us about extraterrestrial behavior any more than our own behaviour can. As mammals whales are relatively closely related to us and their social behaviours aren't dissimilar to our own.

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