"It's not the Turing test just yet, but in one more domain, AI is becoming increasingly competitive with humans. This time around, it's in interplanetary trajectory optimization. From the European Space Agency comes the news that researchers from its Advanced Concepts Team have recently won the Gold 'Humies' award for their use of Evolutionary Algorithms to design a spacecraft's trajectory for exploring the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). The problem addressed in the awarded article (PDF) was put forward by NASA/JPL in the latest edition of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition. The team from ESA was able to automatically evolve a solution that outperforms all the entries submitted to the competition by human experts from across the world. Interestingly, as noted in the presentation to the award's jury (PDF), the team conducted their work on top of open-source tools (PaGMO / PyGMO and PyKEP)."
2More
Chernobyl fallout could drive evolution of 'space plants' - environment - 15 May 2009 -... - 0 views
1More
Computer Scientists Reproduce The Evolution of Evolvability - Technology Review - 1 views
3More
Evolution of AI Interplanetary Trajectories Reaches Human-Competitive Levels - Slashdot - 4 views
3More
NASA Brings Earth Science 'Big Data' to the Cloud with Amazon Web Services | NASA - 3 views
3More