AI Astronomer Aids Effort To Analyze Galaxies 40
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."
Not a troll - actually a very good point (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say the system of scientific paradigms and their rise and fall is about finding outliers and surprising results that cannot easily be explained by current models.
If this is the case, then using a statistical system to classify observations has the danger that these "outliers" simply get classified in existing categories and whatever abnormality they represent thereby ignored.
An "AI researcher" must therefore have very explicit programming to set anything with even the slightest degree of abnormality aside for human evaluation. If it's set to classify anything and everything according to preset rules, it's actually mostly destructive to good science.
I have seen the future (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a couple of answers to your question. The first is the answer to the more general question, "Why study the universe at all?" and the answer is "Because it's there." We want to understand the processes by which the universe we see around us was formed, what it's like now (to the degree that "now" has any meaning on cosmological scales) and where it's going. It is an awe-inspiring place, and becomes more so the more we learn about it.
The second, with respect to the study of the Milky Way, is that we learn a lot about our galaxy by studying other galaxies. We don't have a good vantage point for studying the Milky Way, for obvious reasons. Hell, it wasn't until quite recently that we even knew what shape it was (barred spiral vs. plain spiral.) With the enormous number of galaxies out there, many of them similar to our own, at a variety of viewing angles from Earth, we can get a much better idea of what's going on in our own neighborhood than we could by restricting our observations to the Milky Way alone.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
But to learn about the stuff inside our galaxy, and how it came to be, we need to see how it looked in the past. ;}
Since you haven't gotten around to making that time machine yet, we can't do it that way
Instead we look at light from galaxies that have been traveling in space for an amount of time equal to how far back in time we want to see, and we discover such things as galaxy formation.
This is ONLY possible to do by looking at distant and thus older galaxies. And it does teach us more about our own.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what I was asking, because on the surface it seemed to me to make more sense studying nearby galaxies only. However, some other helpful responders pointed out that far-away galaxies allow us to see farther back in time (essentially, what we see of the far-away galaxies is how they appeared billions of years now, not how they appear now), and see how galaxies form and collide, and this might lead to insight into how our galaxy came into being.
The difference between my questioning and the politicians is that the politicians, being lawyers, aren't honestly looking for answers to their questions. They already have their minds made up and are trying to twist things around to benefit themselves. Normal questions from laymen like myself, when given appropriate answers, yield more understanding for all laymen.