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189 points docmechanic | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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smusamashah ◴[] No.43655793[source]
> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation.

> To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.”

This is lots of manual effort, could the recent advancement in language models help decode animal languages more easily? I guess it will need lots 24/7 capture of physical movement/action and sound data and train a model (that already understands vocal English too) perhaps.

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1. keybored ◴[] No.43657163[source]
Making models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can’t they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants they could get close to approximating something like Newton’s Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be nerdy about it).