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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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!!!
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.
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...
  
  --
  Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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
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
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!