The Mayflower carried some of the first European settlers across the Atlantic Ocean to North America, 400 years ago this year.
To commemorate the anniversary, another vessel is recreating that voyage, with the help of artificial intelligence.
"We don't know how it's going to go. Is it going to make it across the Atlantic?" software engineer and emerging technology specialist Rosie Lickorish told CBS News' Roxana Saberi. "Fingers crossed that it does have a successful first voyage."
The vessel, docked in the harbor of Plymouth, England, will rely on the latest navigation technology when it sets out to sea but it won't be carrying a crew or captain.
"We've got all sorts of cameras We've got global positioning systems on either side," robotics expert Brett Phaneuf said.
What it won't have, he said, is "people space."
Instead the ship will be guided by artificial intelligence designed by IBM.
Phaneuf explained how the technology is supposed to work.
"It looks at its own cameras like eyes, it looks at the radar, it looks at all sorts of other sensors," he said. "Then it charts its own course and it can deal with unique situations without any human input."
Those situations include encountering other ships during the voyage something software engineer Ollie Thompson is working hard to train the ship's programming to recognize using more than a million different images.
"We're simulating what she's seeing," he said of the boat.
Programmers are also setting the ship's destination to Plymouth, Massachusetts to retrace the Mayflower's four centuries-old passage.
It took the wooden merchant ship 66 days to transport dozens of pilgrims across the Atlantic.
A replica sailed from England to Massachusetts in the 1950s, and is still docked there today.
But Phenauf, who grew up near Plymouth, Massachusetts, wanted to mark the Mayflower's famous past by looking ahead instead.
"I thought, well, we should build a ship that speaks to the next 400 years. What the marine enterprise will look like then, as opposed to what it looked like 400 years ago," he said.
An international team turned his vision into the solar-and-wind-powered Mayflower autonomous ship. Its mission is to learn more about Earth's oceans by gathering data on plastic pollution, warming waters and their effects on marine life.
Software developer Rosie Likorish said the autonomous ship is a more cost-effective way to perform the research.
"It's very expensive at the moment for scientists actually go out on these research missions," she said. "So having autonomous vessels like the Mayflower Autonomous Ship is a really important step and kind of actually enabling us to go out to these dangerous places and learn a lot more."
In addition to cost-saving, not having a crew means the size of the vessel can be compact, and there are no concerns over someone getting sick or hurt.
Brett Phenauf said his biggest worry would be if something broke.
If the boat capsized, the team plans to track it via satellite and salvage it.
And if the unknown voyage succeeds, Phenauf says it would commemorate history while charting a new path.
He said, "I want people to look back on this 400 years from now and think about how different this was from what other people were doing."
Link:
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]