Technology used in Netflix, Google can help planetary research - The Siasat Daily

Toronto: Machine learning a powerful tool used for a variety of tasks in modern life, from fraud detection and sorting spam in Google, to making movie recommendations on Netflix -- can help scientists determine whether planetary systems are stable or not, a study says. "Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that's predicting whether planetary systems are stable," said study lead author Dan Tamayo from the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada. Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without having to be constantly programmed for a specific task. The benefit is that it can teach computers to learn and change when exposed to new data, not to mention it's also very efficient. The researchers found that the same class of algorithms used by Google and Netflix can also tell us if distant planetary systems are stable or not.