Human, Artificial Intelligence Join Forces to Pinpoint Fossil Locations

[Tank]

Human, Artificial Intelligence Join Forces to Pinpoint Fossil Locations

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2011) — In 1991, a team led by Washington University in St. Louis paleoanthropologist Glenn Conroy, PhD, discovered the fossils of the first -- and still the only -- known pre-human ape ever found south of the equator in Africa after only 30 minutes of searching a limestone cave in Namibia...

..."The beauty and power of neural networks lie in the fact that they are capable of learning," says Conroy, also a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the School of Medicine. "You just need to give them a rule to deal with things they don't know."

Conroy and colleagues tested the software at the Great Divide Basin last summer. The ANNs correctly identified 79 percent of the area's known fossil sites, and 99 percent of the sites it tagged contained fossils...

Wow! A great step forward, it took years to find Tiktaalik