ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has been taught to discern different smells by researchers at Google, the Silicon Valley tech giant has announced according to TOM FISH in Express
Google researchers have revealed they ave taught an artificial intelligence machine how to smell, bring the cyber-sense up to the standards of sight and hearing. Google’s Brain Team described how they used machine-learning to train a robot to accurately categorise different smells by assessing their molecular structure. The robot was instructed via a database containing 5,000 molecules analysed and identified by perfume makers with descriptions such as “earthy” and “pungent”.
Researchers have long attempted to program a sense of smell using artificial intelligence, but significant issues have proved problematic.
Difficulties included the subjectivity involved in describing smells.
What may register as woody to one person appear earthy to someone else.
Some molecules may seem similar on a molecular level but they have differing scents when arranged in mirror images, causing problems for AI.
However, the Google researchers believe the cutting-edge system may help advance artificial olfaction and help it keep pace with other senses bolstered or mimicked by AI.
The Google team wrote: “Based on these early results with graph neural networks for molecular properties, we hope machine learning can eventually do for olfaction what it has already done for vision and hearing.”
Source: Daily Express