BBC
The accent must have changed over time 🤣
Another story on AI but, this time, the promising and amazing side of it: an AI-powered tool enabled researchers to find caves, in Ireland, that were inhabited thousands of years ago, and there is a link to Wales.
The AI agent can analyze hundreds of thousands of data very fast, in a way that was impossible until recently, and identify patterns and opportunities for further research.
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Researchers believe the first known humans to set foot on Ireland thousands of years ago were most likely from Wales, following the "exciting" discovery of ancient cave art.
During the most recent Ice Age, when much of the British Isles were beneath a vast continental glacier, the depleted sea levels opened a "lost land bridge" between modern-day Pembrokeshire and the south-east tip of Ireland, around Rosslare.
According to rock expert Dr George Nash, from Liverpool University, the opportunities presented by this pathway would have been too good for hunter gatherers to ignore.
Now, alongside an international team of experts, Nash has located eight cave sites in south-west Ireland featuring rock art dating back from at least 15,000 years ago, around 5,000 years before the previous oldest example of humans in Ireland.
[...] He said advances in artificial intelligence (AI) had been a game-changer.
"With the help of caving specialist Shane Diffily and digital mapping consultant Darren Lee, we were able to fill a computer algorithm with everything we knew about the characteristics of cave dwellings in south Wales and set it to work searching for similar sites in Ireland, without us trudging blindly around the countryside, hoping to bump into something which looked promising."
What their computer model spat out was 28 potential caves in south-west Ireland which the team investigated.
Eight of them were found to have cave art which they believe dates from at least 15,000 years ago and possibly much earlier, and around 5,000 years before the previous oldest example of humans in Ireland. [...]
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