Earthquake researchers have been trying to model aftershocks for years. By now, they’re able to fairly accurately predict when aftershocks are going to happen, and how large they’ll be. But they’ve been far from perfect when it comes to pinpointing their location . The answer—of course—appears to be artificial intelligence. A team of collaborators from Google and Harvard team report that after training a neural network, the same kind of AI that powers Facebook photo tagging and Alexa’s voice transcription, on a database of more than 131,000 earthquakes and the locations of their subsequent aftershocks, they’ve come up with the best way yet to predict where future aftershocks will occur. At its core, artificial intelligence is fancy pattern matching: Show it data, whether pictures of someone’s face or the locations of earthquake aftershocks, and the algorithm will try to find the underlying pattern. For facial recognition that pattern is the pix...