Earthquakes happen every day around the world and most of them are just tremors but the ones that are bad, well they’re really bad. Many people lose their lives to earthquakes every year and we have no way of knowing if one is coming until things are falling off shelves. Which is why the news of an algorithm that can predict them is so exciting.
Bertrand Rouet-Leduc working out of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his team have used machine learning to train an algorithm to predict lab created earthquakes. This is really exciting because it may lead to being able to predict quakes in the real world.
The ability to do so is a long way off, there are a lot of variables that make in the wild earthquakes different from what we can produce in the lap. Still, the groundwork is there. This, if the algorithm can be applied to the wild, may serve to save thousands of lives a year. Check out the website for more information.