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AI Astronomer Aids Effort To Analyze Galaxies
kkleiner writes "Scientists are teaching an artificial intelligence how to classify galaxies imaged by telescopes like the Hubble. Manda Banerji at the University of Cambridge, along with researchers at University College London, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere, has succeeded in getting the program to agree with human analysis at an impressive rate of more than 90%. Banerji used data from Galaxy Zoo, a massive online project that has used more than 250,000 volunteers to analyze more than 60 million galaxies. The new automated astronomer will help with even larger analytical projects on the horizon, taking care of trivial classifications and leaving the tough cases to humans."
Well exactly. This isn't so much an "AI" as it is a script that has output depending on its input.
Essentially, any "errors" the computer makes would be an issue with setting up a debugger and seeing why it chose that selection. Then it falls into two categories: It spotted things humans missed when classifying or it has faulty programming that is creating false positives or missing data.
I'd hardly consider that "AI".
Maybe I'm missing something, but what exactly is the point of going to all this effort to classify far-away galaxies? I can understand astronomers wanting to examine closer galaxies and see how they work and interact and all, but surely all the galaxies that are close enough for us to be able to see that much detail have already been known for some time, and are classified, and studied in far more detail than just classifying what kind of galaxy they are (spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, etc.). What good does it do to classify millions of galaxies that you can barely see?
Wouldn't it be more useful to expend this effort on observing objects that are closer to us, and which we can see in much better detail, such as various stars and nebulae within our own galaxy? Or in trying to find more evidence of exoplanets and determine if there's life on them?
After all, it might be possible for us to send ships to nearby stars (like Alpha Centauri) eventually, and examine exoplanets there first-hand. Such a voyage may take a few decades, but it's doable. But unless we come up with a way of creating wormholes or something else that allows us to teleport vast distances instantly, there's no way we'll be able to visit far-off galaxies, ever. They're simply too far away. Even in uber-optimistic Star Trek, with warp speed travel, humans still never left the Milky Way galaxy (except for one episode of TNG with the Traveler, and even that was a nearby galaxy), and stayed mostly within one sector. The whole underlying plot of Voyager was that they were on the other side of the Milky Way, and it'd take hundreds of years to get back at top warp speed.
Pictures showing galaxies that are billions of light-years away make nice posters, but it seems totally pointless to put too much effort into these things, when there's so much we don't know about the stuff inside our own galaxy.