There’s a new Zooniverse project online today: Sunspotter. Essentially a game of hot-or-not for sunspot data; you are shown two images of sunspot groups and asked which is more complex. That might sound odd at first, but it’s really quite easy when you try it – and extremely useful in helping astronomers understand the physics of our star, the Sun.

Sunspotter actually went live a few months ago, but there wasn’t much data at the time, so we didn’t share the link very widely. Now the results from that first trial have been validated and the science works! A new batch of more than 200,000 images has been added to the site and we need everyone to help us rank them in order of complexity.

For more see www.sunspotter.org

mollwollfumble said:

There’s a new Zooniverse project online today: Sunspotter. Essentially a game of hot-or-not for sunspot data; you are shown two images of sunspot groups and asked which is more complex. That might sound odd at first, but it’s really quite easy when you try it – and extremely useful in helping astronomers understand the physics of our star, the Sun.

Sunspotter actually went live a few months ago, but there wasn’t much data at the time, so we didn’t share the link very widely. Now the results from that first trial have been validated and the science works! A new batch of more than 200,000 images has been added to the site and we need everyone to help us rank them in order of complexity.

For more see www.sunspotter.org

How does asking people to compare sun-spots help us advance our knowledge? I would have thought computers could best judge/compare these images.

Witty Rejoinder said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s a new Zooniverse project online today: Sunspotter. Essentially a game of hot-or-not for sunspot data; you are shown two images of sunspot groups and asked which is more complex. That might sound odd at first, but it’s really quite easy when you try it – and extremely useful in helping astronomers understand the physics of our star, the Sun.

Sunspotter actually went live a few months ago, but there wasn’t much data at the time, so we didn’t share the link very widely. Now the results from that first trial have been validated and the science works! A new batch of more than 200,000 images has been added to the site and we need everyone to help us rank them in order of complexity.

For more see www.sunspotter.org

How does asking people to compare sun-spots help us advance our knowledge? I would have thought computers could best judge/compare these images.

+1.

Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Witty Rejoinder said:

How does asking people to compare sun-spots help us advance our knowledge? I would have thought computers could best judge/compare these images.

Apparently this is just one more case where artificial intelligence fails to be as good as human intelligence, in this case in evaluating complexity. Earlier Zooniverse projects asked people to identify the types of galaxies (spiral, elliptical or irregular), pick the difference between a fluctuation in random background radiation and a supernova, and identify animals in photographs of the African plain.

Thanks Moll.

I’ve done a lot of classifying galaxies for Zooniverse, but comparing complexities of sunspots doesn’t sound very exciting nor constructive.