Artificial Intelligence , Now Aiding In the Search for , Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
According to a new paper published in the journal
'Nature Astronomy,' scientists are hoping to apply
machine learning to the search for extraterrestrial life.
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was
established in 1984 and has been scanning space for radio
signals comprised of non-Earth based "technosignatures.".
VICE reports that a machine-learning
algorithm was applied to telescope
data collected in 2016. .
After analyzing over 480 hours of data from
820 stars, the algorithm identified eight signals
of interest that had previously gone undetected.
Peter Ma, the paper's first author, said that while
artificial intelligence has been applied to SETI's data
in the past, his team's approach is something new.
Previously people have
inserted ML [machine learning]
components into various pipelines
to help with the search. , Peter Ma, Undergraduate student at
the University of Toronto, via VICE .
This work relies entirely on just the neural
network without any traditional algorithms
supporting it and produced results that
traditional algorithms did not pick up, Peter Ma, Undergraduate student at
the University of Toronto, via VICE .
According to Ma, his team's work is twice as fast as
traditional algorithms and allows for an out-of-the-box
approach to the search for alien intelligence.
Traditional algorithms operate on
a given set of instructions designed
by us… thus the algorithm will only
ever discover what we tell it to find, Peter Ma, Undergraduate student at
the University of Toronto, via VICE .
The issue is that the nature of an ET signal
is not completely known… Hence our
proposed approach is to just learn it, Peter Ma, Undergraduate student at
the University of Toronto, via VICE