back to article China's asteroid-and-comet hunter probe unfurls a 'solar wing'

China's space agency has revealed its Tianwen 2 probe has unfurled a "solar wing." The mission launched in May on a course that will take it to remote rocks – the "quasi moon" 469219 Kamo'oalewa and comet 311P/PanSTARRS. China's National Space Administration last Friday published its first update on the mission and reported …

  1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
    Windows

    AI Agents Trained on Human Professionals' Knowledge

    Turn your Wayback Machine to the 1980s. "Expert Systems" were the a largely-hyped thing then.

    Some of them worked; some of them did not. The biggest problem with them was the time and expense (employees' salaries) required to properly train them.

    The ones which did work were later discontinued largely due to the cost of re-training them with newer, updated data.

    In 40 years, the people-costs of training and re-training these systems have gone up, not down. Fake AI will not change those financial constraints.

    Of course, if you don't care about accuracy, you don't have to spend money re-training them.

    And if you don't care about accuracy, you can save even more money by getting rid of your expert systems and fake AI systems and replacing them all with a static web page containing the text, "Purchase a new unit and discard the failed unit."

    (Icon for greybearded subject matter expert.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AI Agents Trained on Human Professionals' Knowledge

      And if you don't care about accuracy, you can save even more money by getting rid of your expert systems and fake AI systems ...

      Well said.

      Another five upvotes for you.

      .

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ! ES

    Not exactly a Cavendish and four Granny Smiths but the Morse for E and S recreate the same picture ! . ...

    The PRC a nation of contradictions - its achievement in unmanned space exploration on one hand and cackhanded censorship of a bit of history with which it ought to have accommodated years ago, on the other.

    This inability to recognise and accept unpleasant and brutal elements from the nation's past ultimately poisons its lifeblood. One of the contributing factors behind the current gross dysfunction of the US state is just this inability to accept the inconvenient facts of its history.

    1. Bill Gray Silver badge

      Re: ! ES

      (Yank here) To be fair... it's a rare country that does accept inconvenient facts of its history. Germany is a rare counterexample; it faced its actions in World War II, but only a couple of decades afterward, and under considerable pressure from its youth and from other countries. [0] Japan has never really done anything similar; the atrocities committed in China and Korea are a non-subject. Russia and China would both claim they never did anything wrong to their own citizens or anyone else. That sort of denial, I would argue, is "normal". Admitting error is so rare as to be almost weird.

      The US started to do some introspection a few decades back (again largely due to pressure from youngsters [1]), realized there were a lot of skeletons in our closets, and we now flinch from looking at them. Similarly, Germany is now re-thinking this whole idea that they may have been imperfect.

      Openly admitting that you screwed up takes some courage, either for an individual or a country. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the US had more confidence in itself; we felt we had what it took to face our demons. Nowadays, we're at what I'd argue is (unfortunately) the normal state of affairs : a lot of people who feel that simply acknowledging the bare facts of our history (slavery was a bad thing, killing most of the native population wasn't nice, etc.) is a sign of weakness.

      [0] I suppose that looking around at Germany in 1945 might also have caused people to admit, at least to themselves, that maybe this whole fascism thing wasn't a great idea. I hope my country doesn't figure things out in the same way, but am not optimistic.

      [1] I speculate that it's easier to recognize your country's flaws when you see them as being your parent's flaws.

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