Isn’t this the broken part that needs to change rather than the definition of a planet or moon?
Why? Words are defined by usage. Otherwise, Earth would not qualify as a planet (nor would Uranus and Neptune), but both the Moon and Sun would.
Because people calling everything a planet without having notable distinctions to help you figure out some basic semblance of distances and where-abouts is annoying enough already by people getting it wrong (See the Infinity-Battlescape Prototype livestreams). I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be if that were a commonly accepted usage.
How would I point out when people were wrong with their definitions on the internet if there were a whole bunch of parallel naming schemes? 
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What does celestial object classification have to do with distances or locations?
Then you’d think they’d actually get it right every once in a while.
They don’t.
Who is ‘they’?
At least they got the name of the planet right.
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Just ask Pluto about that one. 
Oh, and moons tend to be in much more interesting places.
A good quote about computers and objectivity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#Uncarved_block
Nice quote. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Any specific random set will have its own bias. And that’s fine because it’s not human bias - which is the point. Also, machines can pursue many more approaches than people can. One of those random sets will eventually hit upon the inherent nature of physics.
Not that I was suggesting randomness as a source of objectivity in the first place.
More topical would have been an observation about everything that we create inherits our human bias to one degree or another. Even a randomly-generated set presupposes our own notions of mathematics and processing, which may be the fundamental stumbling block to understanding physics. The very goal of trying to understand physics may be the wrong approach.
I disagree. I don’t see why a the way of thinking of an AI would be better or worse than that of a human. Merely having a decision being made by someone who is not human or by someone who can think faster and greater than a human is not enough to make that a good decision. Unless the entire point of the system is to find an answer given by someone who is not human, which isn’t very useful, since you could achieve the same results with a dog.
The story of course is not about that, the person wanted to see the system develop new solutions, solutions that weren’t influenced by human decisions. And the other person merely informed him that he wasn’t creating something objective, something without preconceptions, merely something with random preconceptions.
That might be useful if you’re designing Newton’s Machine, something that will make super accurate physics simulations. But it is not very useful when you’re designing a machine that is meant to define what is a planet, what is a planetoid and what is a moon.
That is close to the point I was trying to make. When it comes to matters like naming things or categorizing things, it’s probably impossible to be objective, because the universe itself doesn’t have inside it the notion of a planet or a moon. Those things are patterns that we discover and name, not the building blocks of the universe. So the act of attempting to categorize things itself gives rise to bias.
Creating a machine to categorize things or try and find new categories would simply be creating new subjective solutions, it wouldn’t give rise to anything objective. The only way it would help with the categorization problem would be if enough people agreed that the categorization machine is good enough to trust with any categorization decision it makes.
Anyway, this isn’t the AI/philosophy thread, so I will try to refrain from going further off topic. To stay on topic, we need to think why we want to categorize things first before coming up with a solution to that problem.
The current definition seems to stem from the need to come up with vague rules that will lead to the same results as the earlier traditional categorization and giving guidelines for future categorizations, and it does that OK. You could think of them as rules that take into account backwards compatibility. Which you could say is important to some people, judging by the reactions from Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet. People seem to want their planets to be a certain way. I don’t think people would accept a change to those rules unless a good reason came up.
Then again, the opinion of people in general might not matter. The opinion of astronomers and their community is probably more important. But I’m not an astronomer so I can’t say what their opinion would be.
I want play this game right now!
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Looks like there might be a new planet 10x the size of Earth at 20x the distance of Neptune…
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