Artificial intelligence could easily fall into the trap of identifying non-life as life on other worlds, claim two researchers from Michigan State University who have tested AI on simulated life in a computer program.
"We had previously seen that AI has a big Achilles heel when it is trying to classify things that are unlike the things in its training examples," Michigan's Christoph Adami told Space.com. "We call these 'out-of-distribution' samples and it is just incredibly easy to get AI to misclassify."
Adami is a computational biologist who uses computers to apply information theory to the study of evolution and biology. One of his leading tenets is that life can be defined by its ability to encode information and replicate it. To this end, he devised the Avida computer program in 1993. It runs digital organisms written as code that can replicate by copying themselves and competing for resources — in this case, CPU time — just like real life organisms. Although the use of digital life in evolutionary studies remains controversial, what it does provide Adami with is a huge dataset of simulated lifeforms that Read Entire Article
English (US)