Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
Find and photo By Captain Jonah Matinez.
Jonah sent me this picture several months ago but I never posted it before. Looks like it might have held some decorative stones.
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A treasure hunter that disappeared while seeking the Fenn treasure was located by with the help of artificial intelligence.
When Randy Bilyeu disappeared, he was hunting for the Fenn Treasure, a chest allegedly filled with gold, precious stones, and jewelry, supposedly hidden in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe, New Mexico...
Essentially, it’s an artificial intelligence system that figures out the current location of someone (or thing) using a data set of known previous locations. For example, geospatial abduction can pinpoint the location of a bear’s cave using the coordinates of animal’s droppings, or a serial killer’s address using the coordinates of known killings. Serial killers usually attack within six miles from their home, and bears will stay within the same distance of their cave when they go out on their daily hunts or bathroom trips. Shakarian has designed algorithms that take information like that into account, ingest data points, and, after ruling out obviously impossible locations like lakes, rivers and so on, come up with the most feasible solution to current whereabouts. As with most algorithms of this sort, the more data—the more killings or droppings—the more likely for the solution to be correct.
I bolded and underlined two words in the above excerpt to draw your attention to the fact that AI systems can be used to find things. The same AI system that helped find the lost treasure hunter could also be used to find treasure.
Artificial intelligence is being talked about a lot these days. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google all offer AI capabilities to various industries. AI was one of my interests some thirty years ago. I constructed a couple of few "expert systems." Now artificial intelligence is receiving new attention and is being applied to more significant tasks.
The treasure industry could benefit tremendously from AI but probably won't. There are a variety of reasons for that. It requires expertise that most treasure hunters do not have and do not want to take the time to develop. You almost have to start with the computer skills and then bring those skills to the application.
The tons of GPS data stored over the years by the treasure salvage in Florida provides a very rich database. That would be an ideal starting place for an AI project. The data has already been computerized for the most part.
AI attempts to recognize patterns in existing data and make predictions from incoming data so the AI system is only as good as the data and the algorithms.
I always enjoyed taking big data sets, soaking it in and analyzing the heck out of it. If I was thirty or forty years younger, I would definitely be doing that. So much in life and treasure hunting is about timing.
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It would be easy enough for a manufacturer to install an expert system into a detector that would guide you to the best settings for a specific piece of ground and target type. You heard it here first.
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Here is a book you might like - especially if you find old things and try to identify them.
The book is American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 1680-1820: A Guide to Identification and Interpretation by Carolyn White.
Here is a table from the book showing the items discussed.
Here is the link to the book, some of which can be viewed as a preview.
https://books.google.com/books?id=aWsnAAAAQBAJ&dq=artifacts+of+spanish+colonial+period
Aglets are often found and can easily be confused with a number of other items. They are typically made of copper and in the shape of a rolled cone.
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The surf is picking up a little. Expect something like three to four feet along the Treasure Coast. The wind is from the east. I hope to get out to the beach in the next couple of days.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
