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Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes

Posted by timothy on from the spider-rose dept.

dpp writes "Astronomers working on the eSTAR Project have used software "Intelligent Agents" to control the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and observe a dwarf nova. One of the astronomers says "The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely - augmenting their abilities to do science quicker, faster, and more reliably." Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!), and deploying on more telescopes including the Liverpool Telescope and the Faulkes Telescopes. The full story is at the Joint Astronomy Centre."

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. I claim this article... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    in the name of the hackingthemainframe hard drives! http://hackingthemainframe.com

  2. Intelligent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wish they would stop calling these things intelligent. It's clever programming, yielding programs that act more or less like a human would in a very limited domain. These programs don't have general learning capability and they don't improvise if conditions change beyond what they were designed for, things any intelligent entity should be capable of IMHO.

    Lourens

  3. Re:Interesting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    eStar's targets are things that change radically in brightness. Intesting = variable, whereas most of the objects in the sky have constant brightness. The agents take pictures at intervals and check relative brightnesses against on-line catalogues of celestial objects.