What’s that you say, Flipper?

Dr Denise Herzing hopes CHAT will help us to connect with other sentient beings.

Dr Denise Herzing hopes CHAT will help us to connect with other sentient beings.

Published Jul 6, 2011

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Spielberg should be directing it, or perhaps Richard Curtis. Off the Bahamas a dolphinologist and an artificial intelligence specialist thrown together on board The Stenella are developing a piece of hi-tech gadgetry that will, if it works, fulfil the 1960s vision of talking to dolphins – and, if he shows up, ET as well.

Although no photographs of it have been released yet, we know the Spielbergian-sounding Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry, or CHAT, interface is real, as are the hopes it carries.

It is an iPhone-sized device with two hydrophones attached and a unique one-handed keyboard called a twiddler, which, when combined, is designed to be worn around a diver’s neck while swimming with wild dolphins.

Inside this box is a processor that contains a complex algorithm or pattern detector that, it is hoped, will learn to identify the fundamental units of dolphin acoustic communication to enable humans to decode dolphin and then reply.

“CHAT is more a potential interface than a translator as it is supplying us humans with an acoustic bridge to allow exchanges between two acoustic species,” says Dr Denise Herzing of the Department of Biological and Psychological Sciences at Florida Atlantic University and founder of the Wild Dolphin Project.

She began her long-term study of a pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins in 1985 and, with Dr Thad Starner from the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Sciences, is the brains behind CHAT.

“As dolphins are likely to be the second-smartest creature on the planet, with similar cognitive abilities and complex social structures to humans, this device will hopefully open the window for a great understanding and connection with other sentient beings. Similar interfaces created for chimps and parrots have already increased our understanding of the abilities of these species.”

Herzing is already running workshops with Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) on how to identify non-human intelligences and how to communicate with them.

“Most scientists create a system of communication and expect the dolphins – especially those in captivity – to learn it by using fish as a reward, and they do it, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans.”

From 1997, Herzing’s first attempts to try to co-evolve a language with dolphins led to the creation of a large keyboard with symbols on it, called a lexigram board. The symbols were paired with a whistle, so when under water, dolphins could either press a button with their nose or mimic the whistle to receive the toy they wanted.

She hopes CHAT will develop this work further. Initially divers will play one of eight words Herzing has come up with for things dolphins like, whether “seaweed” or “bow wave ride”, and then the software will listen to see whether the dolphins mimic them.

Then after CHAT’s algorithm has in effect learnt dolphin, it will try to identify the words and grammar of “dolphinese” in the hope that it will help scientists create their own dolphin-like signals; although in the end the interface still depends on humans to interpret what the dolphins mean.

For Justin Gregg, from the Dolphin Communication Project in Connecticut, whose research eavesdrops on natural dolphin communication, CHAT is another way new technology is revolutionising how scientists study dolphins, whether it is the electronic tags dolphins wear or recording devices planted on the seabed.

But for Gregg, while CHAT is “cool and innovative” and the questions it is designed to answer are “perfectly legitimate”, the interface may struggle since the building blocks it is looking for may not exist. He believes the evidence for dolphins having a language “just doesn’t add up”.

“They certainly have some of the attributes that a language requires, but we know now that many species do. In fact there is not more potential in dolphins, it’s about the same as other animals.”

That doesn’t stop people believing that they are special, he says. “It’s a hangover from the 1960s.”

While Dr Seth Shostak, Seti’s chief astronomer, shares Gregg’s concerns over just how special dolphins really are, he is also worried about whether we will be able to understand anything the dolphins are saying if the interface works.

“As dolphins can’t pick up a screwdriver, they are never going to have the kind of technological civilisation that humans have, so even if we were able to pick out distinct dolphin words we would be unlikely to have any idea what they meant as their world view is going to be so different from ours.” – The Independent

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