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"There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”

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hmokiguess

2 days ago

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Would be interesting if this data could bring us ideas on information theory sort of how we have these nature parallels in algorithms like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...

Imagine Whales have better recall, pass@k metrics and deal with context windows differently, who knows!

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frotaur

2 days ago

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Not much info on the actual robot... For instance, I wonder how it has enough battery to follow a whale for 'months'? Which seems really unrealistic, as sperm whales can dive more than a kilometre, can't imagine an autonomous robot can support this kind of pressure, let alone for months at a time?

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rgovostes

1 day ago

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There exist many underwater vehicles that can withstand ocean pressures. The REMUS 6000 for example can reach depths of 6000m.

As the article describes, these are gliders:

> A glider is a small robot that slowly changes its buoyancy, becoming slightly heavier to sink and lighter to rise.

It doesn’t need battery power to endlessly spin a prop. With little energy expenditure it can inflate or deflate a bladder; changing volume changes buoyancy and therefore vertical motion in the water column. The vehicle’s design allows it to “soar” as it does so. The tradeoff is control.

It seems the vehicle they are using is the Alseamar SEAEXPLORER: https://www.alseamar-alcen.com/ocean-science-sector/seaexplo...

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bigbadfeline

2 days ago

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The bot doesn't have to dive deep, it can track, follow and listen to the whales from above using the same sonar gear. Also, I kind of doubt the whales would talk much when in the deep.

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pvaldes

1 day ago

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Logistics here are extra interesting. Sperm whale clicks are basically a sonic weapon. This is maybe the loudest animal known in the history of the evolution, known to be capable to kill an human just with sound if they get alarmed. I wonder if we would be able to watch the destruction of the robot with a extra loud sound wave at any given point or how they designed to avoid it.

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imzadi

1 hour ago

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Then why aren't they killing all the fish?

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lagniappe

1 day ago

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I'm so tired of the surveillance state.