This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

In the hunt for Red October, the Soviet submarine captain, played by Sean Connery,

commands his crew to verify the location of a target.

Give me a ping vassily. One ping only, please.

That ping is known as active sonar. Bob Hedrick of the Office of Naval Research, the

ONR, says it's the audio equivalent of switching on a flashlight. You're getting information

back, but you're also broadcasting your location to other

ships.

You know, number one priority in the submarines remain undetected.

So subs can keep their secrecy by eavesdropping on other ships instead, listening for propellers and electronics and so on.

Such methods known as passive sonar generally require a skilled operator,

but researchers are teaching machines to do it too.

They first recorded the underwater rumblings of cargo ships off the California coast,

using an array of 28 underwater microphones.

They fed that sound along with the ship's actual GPS coordinates to their machine learning algorithms.

Then they gave the algorithm's new recordings and they asked,

Where's the ship?

And it did extremely well.

Emma O'Zannich, a PhD student in underwater acoustics at the Scripps

institution of oceanography.

Using the audio data, she says the algorithms pinpointed the ships to within a couple hundred meters.

That's at distances of up to 10 kilometers.

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