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chalk46 t1_j7banzj wrote

Reply to comment by quantumfucker in AI is helping us search for intelligent alien life—and we've found 8 strange new signals by jormungandrsjig

yeah, that's weird considering this part:
> For our research, we created an algorithm that uses AI methods to classify signals as being either radio interference, or a genuine technosignature candidate.

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theStaircaseProject t1_j7clzd5 wrote

I’m not even remotely an expert in AI or radio-astronomy, but I’d imagine the AI returned results, the researchers investigated the results, and then verified the unlikelihood of the results to be what they’d hoped, indicating a misalignment between what the researchers intended the AI to find and what it actually found. The model may simply need tuning, more or less.

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chalk46 t1_j7cmel7 wrote

yeah I mean personally I think a few false positives are better than having it miss something

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starmartyr t1_j7gz1d5 wrote

It could also be doing its job perfectly. It reads a bunch of signals and points out the ones that look weird. A human then examines these signals to see if there is something to be learned from them. This is useful since we're constantly being bombarded with radio waves from all over the universe. Having an AI sort through them and tell us which ones are interesting is a good tool to have.

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