What do Netflix, Google and planetary systems have in common?

Machine learning is 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. Now a team of researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough have developed a novel approach in using it to determine whether planetary systems are stable or not. "Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that's predicting whether planetary systems are stable," says Dan Tamayo, lead author of the research and a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough. 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.