Google's DeepMind Can Predict Wind Patterns a Day In Advance (engadget.com)

technology_dude writes: Google's DeepMind can predict wind patterns one day in advance. "Beginning last year, [Google and DeepMind] fed weather forecasts and existing turbine data into DeepMind's machine learning platform, which churned out wind power predictions 36 hours ahead of actual power generation," Engadget reports. "Google could then make supply commitments to power grids a full day before delivery." According to the report, this makes the energy generated by its wind turbines more valuable (by roughly 20%). Is this a blow to Big Blue who purchased The Weather Channel's Weather.com to showcase Watson, or is it news just because it's Google?

Comments

I've got a question

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Weather forecasting is a hard mathematical problem with thousands of variables which needs to be calculated to be precise.

The question is: does DeepMind AI/algorithm calculate the weather or it is just guessing it? If it's doing the latter then this guesswork is going to be pretty random and equally worthless, and I see no way it's gonna reach the precision of the known mathematical weather models. It might guess well in the short term (relatively few initial parameters), but in the long term I don't see it working well.

No one read the article

[supercell]

The amount of click bait on Slashdot is getting more than I can bear. It didn't predict make a meteorological forecast ie. wind. It made "wind power predictions" by combining wind forecasts and historical wind turbine power generation data. You can do this with a simple spread sheet.

We have been doing this for years and this is nothing new. This is news because it has Googles name in it and the AI buzz word.

Simply astonishing what people will write up as an article and it makes as "news"