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Flies That Do Calculus With Their Wings

Posted by samzenpus on from the show-your-work dept.

DudeTheMath (522264) writes "Cornell University scientists studied how fruit flies respond to flight disturbances (instead of wind gusts, they used carefully controlled magnetic pulses) and found that the flies recover in as little as three wing beats (at 250 per second) by doing some kind of calculus in a little 'integrated circuit' of neurons that control the wings directly. The pitch and yaw results are already published, and the roll study is forthcoming."

5 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. In other words.... by scottbomb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What the fly does naturally requires the use of calculus to mimick artificially. Seems pretty natural to me. The laws of physics and mathematics are inseperable.

  2. Calculus? by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's like saying that a dog catching a ball or frisbee is doing calculus. Nope, it's experience. Push me this hard, and I push back that hard. It goes that way about that fast, and I'll go this way. Turbulence pushes me here, I'll twitch back. That doesn't mean calculus, that just means quick feedback.

    A human-built bug might have to do the calculus, but the natural bugs don't.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
    1. Re:Calculus? by stox · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, it is doing calculus with a highly optimized analog computer. Amazing what Mother Nature can do given enough time.

      --
      "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
    2. Re:Calculus? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's like saying that a dog catching a ball or frisbee is doing calculus. Nope, it's experience.

      It's not "experience" either. Basically, it's calculus. But the fly isn't doing the calculus. Evolution did the calculus using a massively parallel Monte-Carlo optimization akin to "stupidsort" (stupidsort randomly permutes a sequence and then checks whether it is sorted, iterating when it isn't).

  3. What a retarded headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So when a dog catches a frisbee, is it doing calculus with its teeth?