NASA Announces Computer Algorithm Competition



    TopCoder has hosted the new NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge Series . The task of the competition is to help solve the problem of asteroids that can crash into the Earth and destroy the human race. Specifically, programmers are required to develop new algorithms for recognizing asteroids in images from terrestrial telescopes.

    The NASA competition begins on March 17. The project was launched in conjunction with the private company Planetary Resources, which intends to extract minerals from asteroids.

    The winning program should improve recognition accuracy and reduce the number of false positives, as well as work effectively on computers under all operating systems. Although this is not said in the conditions of the competition, it is quite possible that preference will be given to distributed computing projects, since NASA already has experience in successful crowdsourcing projects. So, last year, NASA invited amateur astronomers to study star clusters in photographs taken with the Hubble telescope.


    Also popular now: