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by adeptus 3460 days ago
I was expecting the AI to reveal for the first time what the bats were saying, instead we learn that AI significantly under-performed what humans already understood about bat communications. Why is this even relevant? Also understanding 61% of the times what the animals were talking about is pretty close to a coin toss. Not impressed -!?

"The results revealed that, based only on the frequencies within the bats’ calls, the algorithm correctly identified the bat making the call around 71% of the time, and what the animals were squabbling about around 61% of the time."
4 comments
lukas 3460 days ago
I'm not sure that the AI significantly under-performed humans. It looks to me like the labels that the accuracy number came from were labeled by watching video of the bats. The 61% understanding number was off of 7 possible topics and averaged over each topic so it's definitely better than guessing. I suspect there's a fair amount of ambiguity and mislabeling in these "topics" from humans trying to interpret bat motivations so 100% accuracy probably isn't really feasible.

I have no idea what the state of the art is in bat understanding but the results seems really impressive to me - maybe I'm easily impressed? :)

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kough 3460 days ago
Given that there are four categories of dispute [0] 61% is significantly better than the uniform prior.

[0] "By studying the video footage, the researchers were able to unpick which bats were arguing each other, the outcome of each row, and sort the squabbles into four different bones of contention: sleep, food, perching position and unwanted mating attempts."

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blacksmith_tb 3460 days ago
I agree the performance isn't too impressive, but it could still be an improvement over trained humans. For example, from the article there's "We have shown that a big bulk of bat vocalisations that previously were thought to all mean the same thing, something like ‘get out of here!’ actually contain a lot of information."
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rokhayakebe 3460 days ago
It depends. How long did it take the AI to come to the same conclusion we have? Speed of learning is very important.
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