Since I haven’t been able to go out much these past two weeks (we have been having very strong “Kona storms”), my mind started to wander and I wondered whether to debug existing code or create new morphometric software. But then I wondered whether conventional software is still needed in the age of AI. I described below a couple of the experiments I made. It seems that there are some alternatives that are worth discussing. Google AI Studio First, I tried Google AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/). I entered the prompt “I need an app that performs an analysis of relative warps (geometric morphometrics) and displays the relative warps plot and estimates of implied shapes at user selected positions in the plot.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that it knew the terms I used and it created a simple interactive app in my browser. It already “knew” about geometric morphometrics. Thus, the computations that were required and how to perform a GPA, a singular-value decomposition, and compute a thin-plate spline. It could generate a plot of a thin-plate spline showing the difference between the mean shape and that corresponding to an arbitrary location in the space of the relative warps. With a little experimentation I found that I needed to give it additional details about the specific options I wanted such as the criterion to stop the GPA iterations and that it should normalize the final configuration to have a centroid size of 1. It also assumed alpha = 1 when computing relative warps, so I had to add “using alpha = 0 when computing relative warps” (although I could have just said perform a PCA” and not mentioned relative warps. I also had to specify that it should use the same scales for the two relative warp axes. It automatically called the new app “MorphoWarp” which sounded like a reasonable name to me. I then had to specify what input file format I wanted to use (its default JSON format looked pretty tedious to prepare). I specified a simple text file format with each row corresponding to a specimen and each containing alternating x and y coordinates. Once the specifications were made, the app ran reasonably fast, though not as fast as a compiled program such as tpsRelw. The app can be uploaded to github and shared with others. I have not done this yet as I would like to make the app more complete first. Claude I then wondered about using an interactive AI bot directly. I tried Claude (https://claude.ai/chat). I gave it the prompt: “Perform an analysis of relative warps on the provided data file. Display the relative contribution of each relative warp. Show a scatterplot of relative warp 2 against relative warp 1 with the axes using the same scale. Label the points numerically.” I also it with the same simple data file as above but it began with the following comment about the format: “The lines (specimens) contain alternating x and y coordinates for 8 landmarks.” It then performed the computations, but, as before, I found I needed to give more details such as the GPA iteration stopping criterion, alpha = 0, and to normalize the final configuration. I could also ask it to produce a thin-plate spline plot of the difference between the average shape and a selected position in the relative warps space. The plots it produced were quite clear and could be downloaded as PNG files. The computations were, however, very slow. No app was produced this way, so the only software to share is the prompt. Broader implications An alternative to downloading morphometric software may be to simply download prompts for AI bots. For serious applications the prompts should, of course, be more complete than my examples. The prompts should reduce ambiguity about how computations should be performed. They should also include test data to make sure the results are correct. Because these systems can “hallucinate,” validation checks are essential. Another consideration is that using conventional software to perform the computations on your own computer might be better for the environment than increasing the need for even larger remote data centers that consume very large amounts of power. This may also be worth discussing. It looks like the rain has stopped. I think I will go back outside for a while. It’s hard to work too hard for too long when on Maui. Jim
F. James Rohlf Distinguished Professor, Emeritus and Research Professor Depts: Anthropology and Ecology & Evolution Stony Brook University -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Morphmet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/morphmet2/Mailbird-bbe66a46-76ca-4b7b-943c-07c973b058be%40stonybrook.edu.
