Spent stages of spaceships are returning. Free Technical Library News

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Spent spacecraft stages are returning

08.01.2012

The self-promotional space company Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, came into the public eye when one of its experimental craft crashed in West Texas last summer. This unmanned ship, having lost control at an altitude of 13,5 km, carried out the command to self-destruct.

"None of us wanted this outcome," Bezos wrote on the Blue Origin website. Now this company is working on the task of how to make the spent booster stages return to Earth on their own so that they can be used in the next launches. Now booster stages simply fall into the ocean, where they are searched for by special vessels.

Private companies are counting on substantial savings by forcing spent stages to land on Earth unaided.

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Monkeys are capable of long reflections 30.04.2023

A study by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh showed that monkeys, like humans, are capable of long-term thinking and careful choice of decisions.

A few decades ago, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman revolutionized the field of behavioral economics with his proposition theory. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, he suggested that people use two different systems of thinking: one is almost instantaneous, which occurs automatically, and the other is conscious-logical, requiring great time and mental effort.

Kahneman called the first type of thinking "fast" and the second - "slow". Slow, expensive thinking allows us to compose music, build scientific hypotheses, or balance the balance sheet.

Neuroscientists challenged two rhesus monkeys with a combinatorial optimization problem. This is the "knapsack problem". It is formulated like this. There is a knapsack (or box) and a number of items that need to be placed in the knapsack. Items of different sizes (or values) and depending on the order in which we put things in a knapsack, more or less things can fit in it. In general, the problem is not solved, that is, there is no optimal stacking algorithm. For a small number of items, there are such algorithms, but they are rather complicated.

The scientists rewarded the monkeys based on the value of the solution they found: the more items they managed to pack, the more valuable the solution. The monkeys gradually stopped rushing and began to think.

The performance and speed of thinking of the monkeys depended on the complexity of the problem, and the solutions found were close not only to the solutions of humans, but also to the optimal choices of optimization computer algorithms. The conclusion made by scientists: monkeys can think.

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