Sysbrain Lets Satellites Think For Themselves

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Sysbrain Lets Satellites Think For Themselves

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 17, 2011 @06:43AM from the skynet-is-upon-us dept.

cylonlover writes "Engineers from the University of Southampton have developed what they say is the world's first control system for programming satellites to think for themselves. It's a cognitive software agent called sysbrain, and it allows satellites to read English-language technical documents, which in turn instruct the satellites on how to do things such as autonomously identifying and avoiding obstacles."

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In other news by suso · 2011-02-17 06:44 · Score: 2

This just in. Studies show that as much as 95% of scientists don't get the moral presented in most sci-fi movies.
1. Re:In other news by Drakkenmensch · 2011-02-17 06:48 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  As soon as they find slashdot and our anti-Skynet stance, we're all doomed!!!
2. Re:In other news by gilleain · 2011-02-17 06:57 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Yeah, I'm not in favour of putting AIs out of easy reach of their off-switches...
  Next step will be hooking them up to the powergrid/nuclear weapons silos/rocket launches, and then equipping them with orbital lasers. Hell, lets just shave our heads and paint bullseyes on them now, to save the mechanical sky-gods the trouble
3. Re:In other news by Anonymous Coward · 2011-02-17 06:59 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Speak for yourself, I am pro-skynet!
  No really.. we're doin a crappy job, time for some new overlords :D
4. Re:In other news by gilleain · 2011-02-17 07:12 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Dammit, who gave the satellite a browser? This is blatant Skynet astroturfing!
5. Re:In other news by Kell+Bengal · 2011-02-17 07:14 · Score: 2
  
  Hmmm... autonomous satellites in control of power grid and nuclear weapons.... that's a great idea! I'll write the grant proposal immediately!
  
  --
  Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
  altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
NLP + sEnglish != thinking by blair1q · 2011-02-17 06:52 · Score: 4, Informative

They're being programmed in a scripting language.
Nothing to see here (other than a web journalist who probably thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea). Move along.
1. Re:NLP + sEnglish != thinking by oodaloop · 2011-02-17 07:31 · Score: 2
  
  It seems every time there's an advance in computer intelligence, it gets dismissed as mere "computation" instead of thinking. Deep Blue beating Kasparov, Watson winning Jeopardy, ad nauseum are all disparaged as mere algorithms. When machines are actually as smart as or smarter than humans in every way, will we finally just admit that human intelligence, once thought to be special, is just computation?
  
  --
  Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
2. Re:NLP + sEnglish != thinking by nospam007 · 2011-02-17 09:26 · Score: 2
  
  "On top of that, it will be able to read manuals. "
  There you go, 90% of mankind is mentally unable to do that.
Not completely impressed, sorry by Anonymous Coward · 2011-02-17 06:55 · Score: 5, Informative

Sysenglish is basically a program language, a
Check this:
Find your current position Pc. Define Hd as a 'heading direction'. Execute
" Hd = Pnxt-Pc; ". Detect obstacle position Obst in heading direction Hd. If Obst
is empty, then move with heading direction Hd. If Obst is not empty, then do the
following. Compute turned heading direction Hds from Hd. Detect obstacle
Found it on : http://wikibin.org/articles/senglish.html
Sorry, nice application, cool satelites, but not really, really new
1. Re:Not completely impressed, sorry by smallfries · 2011-02-17 07:04 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  So.... a really verbose version of:
  Pc = find()
  Hd = Pnxt-Pc
  Obst = detect(Hd)
  if Obst!=NULL
  Hds = turned_heading(Hd)
  detect()
  Hate to say it, but the AC may have a point...
  
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  Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
2. Re:Not completely impressed, sorry by Chelloveck · 2011-02-17 09:45 · Score: 2
  
  Who is supposed to be helped by a language like this? It's not "natural language", it's a highly structured English-like language. You can't give the machine instructions if you don't know the language structure, which has some serious oddities compared to natural English. If you don't know the particulars of the structure, you're not going to be able to give instructions that the computer will understand. And if you do know the structure, you could have just as easily learned a concise, traditional computer language. Here's the example code, unwrapped and indented but otherwise unchanged.
  
  Find your current position Pc. Define Hd as a 'heading direction'. Execute " Hd = Pnxt-Pc; ". Detect obstacle position Obst in heading direction Hd. If Obst is empty, then move with heading direction Hd. If Obst is not empty, then do the following. ....Compute turned heading direction Hds from Hd. ....Detect obstacle position Obst2 in heading direction Hds. ....If Obst2 is empty, then move in heading direction Hds. ....If Obst2 is not empty, then do the following. ........Compute turned heading direction Hds2 from Hds. ........Detect obstacle position Obst3 in heading direction Hds2. ........If Obst3 is empty, then move in heading direction Hds2. ....Finish conditional actions for second heading. Finish conditional actions for first heading.
  
  Get any phrasing wrong, or omit one of those "Finish conditional actions..." clauses and you're just as boned as if you'd dropped a semicolon or a brace in C. I suppose it looks like English when you read it, but writing it is harder than writing real code because perfectly valid English expressions aren't valid sEnglish.
  So who, exactly, is this supposed to help?
  (Kind of like how Slashdot's text entry looks like HTML, but it's not, and pretending that it is will mess you up...)
  
  --
  Chelloveck
  I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Re:Sounds great! by icebike · 2011-02-17 07:10 · Score: 2

What could possibly go wrong?
Probably means we have have to launch new satellites.
The satellites will probably read some steamy romance/werewolf novel being downloaded across the net and start screwing with or biting each other. Either that or someone will download all the Slashdot source code and the satellites will crash and burn.

--
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Remote Agent by xleeko · 2011-02-17 07:25 · Score: 2

NASA already did a better version of this twelve years ago on the Deep Space 1 probe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1#Remote_Agent
And in fact, for extra style points after the first successful maneuver the following exchange occurred over the mission control voice network:
"This is the flight director - Congratulations to Remote Agent. It has successfully operated the Deep Space 1 spacecraft".
"Flight, ACS."
"Go ahead ACS"
"Congratulations to Captain Dunsel"
What about me?? by ocdscouter · 2011-02-17 08:17 · Score: 2

I don't always get subjugated by a malevolent cyber-overlord, but when I do, I prefer Skynet.
Stay Vanquished My Friends.
Re:Computers don't think by c6gunner · 2011-02-17 08:27 · Score: 2

Really? People constantly do what they're told; whether it's their boss, their better half, their parents, hormones or past traumas.
Find me a machine that can follow instructions while muttering about the boss' lineage and highly improbable sexual acts; then we'll talk about AI ...
Re:So.. by Nefarious+Wheel · 2011-02-17 09:01 · Score: 2

I think they reinvented COBOL.

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