Supercomputer AI Destroyed A Mass Extinction

A sophisticated AI ran on one of the most powerful supercomputers of today attacked one of the biggest paleontologists foes – the fossil record. And it seems to have won by destroying the mass extinction event in the Devonian period.

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Mass extinction events – at least the real ones that happened – are truly fascinating. They wave at us from the fossil record and frighten us with the destructive power and the fact that we do not understand them. They are like a deathly planetary secret – shadows of monsters from a world long gone.

New research coming from Douglas Erwin from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and his colleagues decided to put these shadowy monsters against monsters that could prove scary in the future. An artificial intelligence powered by one of the most powerful supercomputers of the world challenged a mass extinction event that was in the fossil record. And the AI performed quite well – if you consider the cancellation of one of the five largest extinction events as a success.

We know well that the fossil record is full of holes. That makes our ideas about biodiversity during Earth's history quite hard – including our ideas about mass extinction events. Simply said – the fossil record brings paleontologists to the brink of insanity. Erwin and his colleagues decided to take a purely statistical approach. They analyzed one-hundred thousand records of about eleven thousand ocean lifeforms from various periods between the beginning of the Cambium period and the beginning of the Triassic period. The fossils of these lifeforms were found in Europe and China. The analysis covers roughly a period of three-hundred million years.

Of course, this approach is very demanding computationally. A normal computer would require many years for such an analysis. The researchers thus used the services of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer that can be found in China and is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The supercomputer AI mapped the development of biodiversity in the given period and concluded that one of the five mass extinction events never happened. It is the Devon mass extinction event. Well, it's not likely beings didn't die during that period but the analysis indicates that there was no sudden catastrophe but a slow decline of ecosystems that took place over fifty million years.

There is one problem though – there is no formal definition of what a mass extinction event is. Every one can imagine something a bit different. Most experts can somewhat agree that during a mass extinction event a large number of species go extinct during a relatively short time-frame. A fun fact is that it is really hard to figure out how long the mass extinction event was from the fossil record. Was it a week? A thousand years? Or ten million years? Now imagine how heated the debates about mass extinctions and the mechanisms that accompany them. No surprise that the number of mass extinction events can vary from three to twenty between different scientists. And since now AI has entered the game it can only get more interesting.

Sources:

• https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6475/272

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