The Math of a Fly's Eye May Prove Useful

cunniff writes "Wired Magazine points us to recent research that demonstrates an algorithm derived from the actual biological implementation of fly vision (PLoS paper here). Quoting the paper: 'Here we present a model with multiple levels of non-linear dynamic adaptive components based directly on the known or suspected responses of neurons within the visual motion pathway of the fly brain. By testing the model under realistic high-dynamic range conditions we show that the addition of these elements makes the motion detection model robust across a large variety of images, velocities and accelerations.' The researchers claim that 'The implementation of this new algorithm could provide a very useful and robust velocity estimator for artificial navigation systems.' Additionally, the paper describes the algorithm as extremely simple, capable of being implemented on very small and power-efficient processors. Best of all, the entire paper is public and hosted via a service that allows authenticated users to give feedback."

Comments

Re:I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, you've got to at least RTFS.

We don't understand it but we can do it

[erroneus]

Why does this sound like every PC user and quite a few programmers I have had to deal with?

I find it unimaginable that people would attempt to implement a technology that is not fully understood. Doing so will eventually yield unexpected results or at the very least, results that cannot be explained.

I am not saying that everything we presently or regularly do is something that everyone presently understands as I am sure there are ample examples of this happening everywhere. Usually, however, "someone" somewhere actually knows and understands because they created it. In this case, it seems, things are being created and implemented without a full working understanding of how it all works. At the very least, such inventions should be unworthy of patenting.

Re:We don't understand it but we can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised. About medicine.

Starting with simple Aspirin, the line of medicaments that have known positive results but nobody knows why, is loooooooong.

Re:We don't understand it but we can do it

[4D6963]

Why isn't it modded off-topic? So we don't know everything for sure about how a fly's brain works, but it doesn't matter, because we're looking at them for inspiration for the algorithms actually implemented, which we actually understand. No one's stupid enough to not understand their own algorithms, at least not at that level.

Re:We don't understand it but we can do it

[hatemonger]

I find it unimaginable that people would attempt to implement a technology that is not fully understood. Doing so will eventually yield unexpected results or at the very least, results that cannot be explained.

Except that occasionally building a working model is a useful step to understanding it. I'm happy that Edward Jenner in 1796 started infecting people with cow pox as a way to prevent small pox even though he didn't fully understand why it worked.

Re:We don't understand it but we can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to stop dealing with Indian outsourcing firms and their "programmers"?

When all you program for is Windows and .NET like they do, and most of that is closed-source to most developers, of course you won't have a fucking clue what's going on.

Almost all of us open source developers know what's going on from the the hardware up. We can see ever layer of the Linux, FreeBSD or OpenSolaris kernels, for instance. Those of us who did chip design in the past also know how the hardware works (and we usually know the quantum mechanics underlying modern transistor design, as well).

Re:We don't understand it but we can do it

[MBCook]

Well, it's not flying airplanes full of people. They've copied a system that seems to work well, and they are testing it for ultra-small UAVs. They'll get a better idea of how it works then.

There are many things people have used throughout history without understanding how they work. Salt preservation is ancient, but we didn't discover the bacteria it kills until the last 200 years.

Sometimes, "works" is good enough. And works often leads to understands.

I think this is really cool. We've been trying to do this kind of thing for years. The fly does it with a tiny-micro-fraction of the resources we were using, and does a much MUCH better job. By testing this system, perhaps we'll find out WHY our systems are tricked by certain stimulus and this one isn't.

It's not like they put a bunch of stuff together and said "this works, as far as we can tell", they took a proven system and copied it.

A good read...

[CockMonster]

But where's the source code???

Refreshing Story

[BJ_Covert_Action]

This might be offtopic but seeing a legitimate R&D story on slashdot with a link to the actual (open) technical write up of the research made my day. I haven't read the whole paper yet (I will when I get home) but going through it and reading the first few sections I can see that the researchers included their (simulink?) processing models as well as some good data in the results section. This story finally gave me something worth breaking out my old signal processing and DAC notes from college out over and studying the raw math and theory behind the algorithm.

I have to say, I really wish we would see more papers like this posted and published openly. It's very inspiring when other folk in similar fields can access a paper's full contents and start playing with similar models themselves...