Mr Hocking, who led the new work, commented: “The important thing about our algorithm is that we have not told the machine what to look for in the images, but instead taught it how to ‘see’.”

Source: Analysing galaxy images with artificial intelligence: astronomers teach a machine how to ‘see’

The new work appears in “Teaching a machine to see: unsupervised image segmentation and categorisation using growing neural gas and hierarchical clustering”, A. Hocking, J. E. Geach, N. Davey & Y. Sun. The paper has been submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.