Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein.
“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. To find their prey-generally squid-in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.
#Once upon a time doctor whale free
While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. (Sharks see only in blue and green fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera.
While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions.
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