Artificial Brain May Speed Up Cosmology

Pulse

oi-Staff

Friday, March 5, 2010, 11:55

Lead researcher and postgraduate student Cesario Almeida has developed an artificial neural network (ANN) to accelerate the process of creating mock catalogues of galaxies.

This comes as a technique that will be based on how brain neurons behave, which can dramatically speed up computer simulations of the universe. And now, with the new page that has been unfolded, many scientists believe that the same can be of great help to solve a range of astronomy, mathematics and engineering problems.

This study, as the scientists believe, varies quite a lot than the others done on the same lines. ANN uses to create their mock galctic catalogue in several wavelengths of light. By comparing mock galactic catalogues with actual observations, such as the ATLAS sky survey, currently being conducted by the Herschel space observatory, cosmoslogists can assess how well their models perform.

Needless to say, the revelation has been quite intriguing for the researcher himself. "At all the wavelengths considered we find that the luminosity functions predicted by the ANN are in excellent agreement," ABC Online quoted the researchers, as saying.

Associate Professor Andrew Hopkins of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, says the technique could speed up research in the field of cosmology. "It's certainly exciting that it can speed up this process," he said. "It opens up a new approach to try and attack these problems because it can work very quickly on a large number of ," concludes the man.

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