Artificial brain may speed up cosmology

Friday, July 17, 2009 08:33:00 AM, ANI

Melbourne: University of Durham cosmologists have come up with a novel technique, based on how brain neurons behave, which can dramatically speed up computer simulations of the universe.

Lead researcher and postgraduate student Cesario Almeida has developed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to accelerate the process of creating mock catalogues of galaxies.

ANN simulates the way brain neurons connect and compute information.

The scientists hope it can be used to solve a range of astronomy, mathematics and engineering problems.

During the study, Almeida and colleagues used the ANN to create their mock galactic 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.

The study showed that ANN-derived universe matched previous, well-known models with an accuracy of between 80pct and 90pct.

Moreover, it was best at simulating galaxies in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.

"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. It opens up a new approach to try and attack these problems because it can work very quickly on a large number of simulated galaxies," he said.

"It's an important cog in a very large wheel and sidesteps a lot of messy detail," he added.

Home | Top of the Page

  Comment on this article

Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) Who devised a Secure World

France's Encounter with Pharaoh Ramesses

In 1905 more than 100 years from today, when Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore he was invited by his student Lala Hardayal to preside over a function. Instead of making a speech, Iqbal sang....Read Full

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad - Preacher of the Peace and Harmony

Saudi King calls for Interfaith Dialogue: The Saudi king has made an impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews — the first such proposal from a nation with no diplomatic ties to Israel and a ban on non-Muslim religious services and...Read Full

Introducing Islam

Taliban’s Jizya is Extortion, Nothing to Do with Islam: Indian Muslim religious leaders have unanimously condemned in strongest terms the Pakistani Taliban’s kidnapping, extortion of huge amounts....Read Full

Our terror, their terror: Doval’s response was that the term ‘Hindu terror’ worried him. There were, he said, two dimensions to any battle against terror. The first was law and order. You should treat all terrorists as murderers regardless of their....Read Full

Fascism and Terrorism: Two Sides of the same coin: “It seems that the fascist forces with a clear anti-Muslim agenda have infiltrated the security forces. Since the Indian... Read Full

The storm sweeping south Asia: “Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires” stated  General  David H. Patraeus, head of the US Central Command, in an attempt to.....Read Full

The Hidden Face of the Terrorism Exposed At last: A nation under the siege, innocent lives are at stake and the basic structure of the country in itself is at risk...Read Full

Terrorist vs Terrorism

Victims of Terror