Underwater robot tracks sperm whale conversations in real time (opens in new tab)

Reminded me of the quantum cryptography concept where people could hoard encrypted data and wait until the tech caught up and allowed decryption. The whales would need to be communicating with this in mind...

They said we have six months to get our shit in order or they're calling their big brother tube-shaped space probe and we won't like talking to him.

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!

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?

I'm so tired of the surveillance state.

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.