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Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth
- mikexstudios 9y agoWolfram alpha for comparison: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+earth+in+light+years https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+e...
- d--b 9y agoWA thinks the distance is 0.9843 AU...
- xrisk 9y agoThe distance between the sun and the earth is not constant, whereas the AU is.
- chungy 9y agoThat's actually correct at the time of this post :) AU is an average distance from Earth to the Sun. Since Earth's orbit is elliptical, it will be closer than 1AU at certain times of year, and further than 1AU at other times in the year.
- thecompilr 9y agoThat is probably the current distance. 1 AU is the mean distance.
- Someone 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit: ”Originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion” https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical-unit https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical-unit: ”a unit of length effectively equal to the average, or mean, distance between Earth and the Sun” I wondered whether the two are equal. A bit to my surprise, they are (http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon-gordon/RecentArticles/average-distance-in-ellipse.doc http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon-gordon/RecentArti...) (If we take into account that earth moves faster near its perihelion, I think that will break down) And, nitpick, nowadays, the AU apparently is exactly 149,597,870,700 meters.
- brianpgordon 9y agoThat's because it is. The Earth's orbit is elliptical, varying between 0.983 and 1.017 AU at its minor and major axes.
- vinchuco 9y agolet's not be so quick to be so harsh. Remember the glee WolfAlpha provides us with their interactive visualizations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slop2Vi8cKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slop2Vi8cKE
- binarycrusader 9y agoBing also seems to give something sensible.
- isoprophlex 9y agoIf they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...
- smt88 9y agoGoogle Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable. I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.
- stmw 9y agoI'm glad it's not just me.
- binarycrusader 9y agobing seems to get this right in both instant search and otherwise.
- zenexer 9y agoI'm slowly switching to Bing--not because Bing is getting better, but because Google is getting worse. Google consistently ignores key terms in my queries, and searches are getting slower and slower. Remember when Google used to have that little timer in the top-right corner of the search results? Not anymore...
- w4tson 9y agoThat’s just general search. When looking for code issues and snippets it’s worse Don’t even get me started with github. Half of humanity’s code seems to be in some bucket that doesn’t understand punctuation when you search
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- MiddleEndian 9y ago
- thebyrd 9y agoBut it seems to get it right if you ask the same question in the opposite order https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun
- nv-vn 9y agothe magic of machine learning, everybody
- innagadadavida 9y agothey are using AI, not machine learning.
- pizza 9y agoGoogle seems to think that Earth is Gliese 412 Gliese 412 is a pair of stars that share a common proper motion through space and are thought to form a binary star system. The pair have an angular separation of 31.4″ at a position angle of 126.1°.[12] They are located 15.8 light years distant from the Sun in the constellation Ursa Major. Both components are relatively dim red dwarf stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412
- TomK32 9y agoIt's still cloudy here in Austria, I'll count the number of suns later when the clouds are gone.
- austrianguy 9y agoNot so cloudy in Burgenland, I only see one. But I don't have a telescope with a sun filter to scientifically prove it.
- chris-at 9y agoIsn't the earth flat in burgenland?
- phillc73 9y agoNo, it's an ellipse with infinite radius.
- majewsky 9y agoI got confused at your mention of "Burgenland" together with your nick, which led me to find out that "Burgenland" and "Burgenlandkreis" (Burgenland county) are two different counties in two different countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenlandkreis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenlandkreis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenland
- 9y ago
- Figs 9y agoHuh... with JavaScript off, I get the answer "Distance from Sun: 92.96 million " (presumably miles) on the right hand side. With JavaScript on, I get the wrong answer from the title. Edit: Actually, it gets the same answer on the right side with JS enabled; didn't notice that earlier. So just the instant answer is missing in the JS-disabled case. Also, here's a screenshot for posterity (with JS enabled): https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png
- muthdra 9y agoScreenshot from Brazil: https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png
- vinchuco 9y agohttps://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun https://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun
- killerdhmo 9y agoI tried now on my Google Home, same query, same result.
- Adverblessly 9y agoWith JS disabled I get "Distance from Sun: 149.6 millio...", presumably kilometers. Incidentally, thank you Google for filling half of my monitor with whitespace...
- billrobertson42 9y agoGoogle's systems do not, "think."
- smt88 9y agoWould you really prefer an accurate title like, "Google's machine-learning instant-answer algorithm's output is '15.81 light years from earth' when the input is 'how far away is the sun from the earth'"?
- jsolson 9y agoHaving interacted with a lot of computers over the years (including Google's for the last several of my employment), the machines at Google come as close to thinking as I've ever encountered. Two or three times a day they come up with answers that I cannot begin to comprehend how they arrived at. Sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are dumb, and sometimes they are merely mad. They give every coworker I've ever had a run for their money on catching my fuckups.
- d--b 9y agoDistance Earth-Sun = 1 AU 1e6 AU = 15.81 light years. Somebody did not pick up the 'e6' part...
- sigmaprimus 9y agoYes definitely a decimal place error https://www.calculateme.com/astronomy/astronomical-units/to-light-years/1000000 https://www.calculateme.com/astronomy/astronomical-units/to-...
- cjensen 9y agoPretty much. The sidebar references Wikipedia's List of brightest stars [1]. That table has the distance from Earth to the Sun in lightyears. So maybe a parsing problem with 0.000015813. On the January 21st this was changed from 0.000 015 813, so it may have been parsing that wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_table_of_the_brightest_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_t...
- ryanatallah 9y ago"Earth distance to sun" gives the correct answer: https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=earth+distance+from+sun https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=e...
- mkl 9y agoInteresting. It says 149.6 million km, which is correct. [distance earth to sun in km] gives 149.6 trillion km, which is 15.81 light years.
- sigmaprimus 9y agoSomeone should win a bug bounty for that one !
- compsciphd 9y agoI'm not sure I like Google's attempt to solve global warming.
- ridiculous_fish 9y agoGoogle was also quite confident that the alphabet starts with J and ends with G. https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/866096971173449729 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/86609697117344972... Just tried it again, now it both starts and ends with A. 50% improvement ain't bad.
- orliesaurus 9y agoA little parsing error here, a little parsing error there...
- joelbondurant 9y agoQueries like this are better thrown to WolframAlpha.
- keitarofujiwara 9y agoWe should send satellites to Alpha Centauri before Google figures this out.
- Cybiote 9y agoAs of this posting, if you put a "what" in front of the query, it returns the correct average distance. I suspected the parser, even if it was learned, is sensitive to the query format. Despite what the press teams of large companies will tell you, our ability to model language is still in its early infancy.
- oh-kumudo 9y agoIf you google distance between Sun and Earth, Google gets it right.
- kevinslashslash 9y agoMy son likes to ask our Google Home the distance to different planets. The numbers, though generally technically correct (sun has worked in the past), are misleading as some are minimum, some average distance and some maximum. For example "distance to mars" says 54.6 million km, which is the theoretical minimum. "distance to venus" says 261 million km which is maximum. I believe it was Jupiter that previously gave an average distance but now I'm seeing minimum.
- mehrdadn 9y agoBy the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?
- function_seven 9y agoWouldn’t those be the same? The periods of each planet’s orbit aren’t factors/multiples of one another, so eventually any two will be at opposite points in their orbit.
- mehrdadn 9y agoThe maximum distance between two ellipses is not the same as the maximum distance between all pairs of points on them right? Like just imagine measuring the maximum distance from a circular orbit to itself. One measure would give zero (zero separation between the orbits) and the other would give twice the radius (individual points can be 2R away from each other). If I'm doing this correctly I think the max distance between two points would come out to max_x max_y ||x - y|| whereas the max distance to the orbit would come out to max_x min_y ||x - y||.
- eesmith 9y agoThere are orbital resonances, but you are right that none involve planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance The closest is the 2:3 ratio of Pluto:Neptune. (It counts if you consider Pluto a planet. ;) Otherwise, there's a nice table showing "near-integer-ratio relationships between the orbital frequencies". If I understand it correctly, each of the bigger-than-a-dwarf-planet planets will be at their furthest possible distances from each other in timescales no longer than about 50,000 years.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agothe AIs are coming to kill us any day now
- maaaats 9y agoNot only is Google "borrowing" content from others to show directly in the search results, more often than not it's completely wrong. Either because they have failed to parse the data correctly, or because it's from some shady web page (happens when googling stuff related to vaccines for instance).
- crististm 9y agoHave a glimpse at the kind of errors we will be facing with the machine-learning AI in the near future. How do we debug them and how do we know there is an error to correct in the first place?
- Kenji 9y agoThe only thing I feel is pure schadenfreude. AI still has very, very long ways to go.