Slashdot Mirror
A.I. Software To Command NASA Mission
EccentricAnomaly writes: "NASA's Three Corner Sat mission will use artificial intelligence to command three formation-flying spacecraft. JPL has a press release here. And there's more information about the A.I. software here. The software is apparently the next generation of the software used for Deep Space One."
And the problems don't stop there. What about the labor disputes that are bound to arise? A greater emphasis on computer-controlled spaceflight will inevitably result in cutbacks in personel, as living breathing astronauts are replaced with cyborg equivalents. And don't fool yourself by thinking they'll still need technicians to manage the cyborgs; there's a huge difference between a non-prescribing technician and a board-certified specialist surgeon, and there'll be a huge difference between a greasy fellow with a monkey wrench and today's red-blooded military men and astronauts. Besides, would the cyborgs even allow humans to tend to them? Never. It would undercut their quest for world domination and we'd learn the secrets of the rayguns they point at our heads and pancreases from global satellites in low-earth orbit.
No. A thousand times no! AI has its place: on my desktop, providing consumers with cheeful and prompt advice concerning spreadsheets and form letters. It is certainly not in space, where a rogue AI would have free reign to decide to change courses or otherwise alter its mission. You may think it's fine to send an unregulated robotic probe off to Mars to collect samples, but you won't be laughing when that robot claims Mars in the name of cybernetics and starts broadcasting communistic Mars Free Radio signals at our precious bodily television bands.
One of the main problems with using machine learning is a fundamental lack of trust, and this lack of trust actually has a theoretical basis. Take a neural network that attempts to learn problem X, given a specific set of inputs, it learns to always give the correct answers. The point to emphasize here is that this type of AI only learns how to give good results to a given problem, machine learning does not provide coherent solutions to problems!
... it just gives the right results (most of the time).
... scientists will have to find new day jobs, however. :) Seriously, though, this NASA mission is important to me because it shows that scientists are not afraid to employ machine learning techniques instead of spending a great deal of time and money trying to solve a set of problems and then develop expert systems for each little situation.
Thus, on a fundamental level, machine learning cannot be trusted. The state of a neural network, for example, is a black box from which no real insight can be gained
Imagine a neural network whose training set is the raw molecular structure data of different diseases (input) and their cures (output). The network trains on this data until the error reduces to zero. Then you feed in the raw molecular data of some new badass disease, and as output you have the structure of a working cure! The problem goes away, even though no one really knows how the solution was found, since a neural network contains no real data to understand -- it is a black box.
This is why scientists are so skeptical when it comes to AI techniques, it is essentially an affront to the scientific method. I personally believe that machine learning can be effectively used to improve our lives
10 avoid $SUN
20 avoid $PLANETS
30 become $SMARTER THAN HUMAN CREATORS COULD HAVE DREAMED
40 multiply
50 goto 10
3CS will utilize a PowerPC 750 flight processor.
The PowerPC 750 is also known as the G3, BTW. PowerPCs in space? Not the first time we've heard about such a plan. Of course, SkyCorp is using Apple-built G4 systems, while 3CS is probably just using the G3 with some off-the-shelf embedded controller-style board.
Does anybody know about the vulnerability of PowerPC chips to radiation, or how "rad-hardening" works in chips like the modified 386s the military uses? Cosmic rays tend to be very high energy, so shielding is probably not practical.
From what I understand, there are two types of radiation-induced errors. Hard errors involve damage to the chip, and are very bad. Soft errors are a matter of erroneously flipped bits, and are only somewhat bad. Soft errors could be compensated for through good software design, error correction, etc., but I would think the only real defense against hard errors would be to make the wires on the chip so damn big that a few defects here and there wouldn't matter.
I happen to work at a particle accelerator with an isotope seperator and accelerator, so you'd think I'd know this stuff, but I've never really thought about this particular application before. Oh well, if nobody answers me, I can always try a SRIM simulation at work tommorow (don't have a Windows box at home to run it on), to see how much shielding you'd need to stop cosmic rays, and how many defects they'd cause in silicon. If anybody wants easy karma points, download the SRIM software, run a simulation on a thick silicon layer with some high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei at, say 1GeV), turn on damage calculations, and report the results back here, please. I'm sure somebody will mod you up.
NASA software that thinks for itself and makes decisions without help from ground controllers will fly as the brains of triplet satellites in 2002. - NASA/JPL news release.
/. make decisions and "think" for themselves. The fact that this software uses its pattern recognition abilities to execute a limited number of pre-programmed decisions, does not make it intelligent IMO. It's a cool hack but to me, unless it has HAL-like capabilities, that's all it is, a cool program. If it cannot learn from its mistakes, it's not intelligent.
All software systems including the software that runs
NASA loves to 'commercialize' their developments. In this way, they are probably the highest profile form of corporate welfare there is. NASA does the R&D and then hands over the exclusive rights for a pittance to some commercial outfit to turn into a product.
It may be apocryphal, but I think Beowulf just barely missed being locked-up by this kind of old-school thinking. The saving grace was that most of the original Beowulf work had been done by a sub-contractor and, unlike most of the rest of the industry, NASA had not required that the sub to turn over IP rights to the client (NASA) in their contract. So once Beowulf got big, the NASA administration came around wanting to lock it up and give it to one vendor, but they were foiled by their own contract, and the contractors were able to free the source for the work they had done.
Thus leaving me free to say, "Imagine that AI running on a Beowulf cluster!"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What reason does NASA have for not releasing the source? It's not like they're a business - this is purely scientific. Slap a GPL (or BSD) on these babies and let everyone take a gander...
What makes this "AI"? Or to turn the question around, why aren't routers and print spoolers considered AI if this is? Artificial Intelegence is a big problem; it's solution isn't hastened by using the term as a synonym for "we picked a better algorithm than you might have expected us to."
*grump*
-- MarkusQ
I wish people would stop referring to semi-dynamic code as "artificial intelligence" Anyone who knows the definition of A.I. knows that environmental modifiers that cue preset responses don't qualify as intelligence. Dave would've passed the Turing test, I think.