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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."

15 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. It's hardwired by invictusvoyd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Things implimented in hardware are always more efficient that those in software . For the fly it happens at such a low level that it is extremely efficient.

  2. Interesting by colinrichardday · · Score: 5, Funny

    Any way of installing these wings on college students?

  3. So... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Horrid little vermin, and the thing likely has a couple of brutally well optimized high speed analog PID controllers, all within its (very tight) payload limits, and all since before we were grunting and hitting one another with rocks. Thanks nature...

  4. 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.

  5. 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. Re:Calculus? by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Indeed. This is more like the smart bomb sights or artillery computers from WWII. Analogue all the way, and because of that, incredibly fast.

      A dog catching a hubcap-like plastic object is a more complex operation, and the brain is involved, running an evolved trajectory program that isn't very fast, nor very accurate, and tends to freeze when run in parallel. But it's fast enough and accurate enough that the dog catches the thing most of the time.
      Presumably, some far distant ancestor caught falling fruit or jumping fish, or catching tidbits flying from your parents ferocious eating, and the ability to just do slightly better than your peers meant greater chance of survival for you and your offspring.
      These days, the genes might be favored again, because we like dogs to play with us.

      Well, that's how it works outside Oklahoma and Alabama, anyhow.

  6. Time, distance, motion, acceleration by Todd+Palin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Time, distance, motion, and acceleration are all things that a moving organism needs to master to survive. These things can be mathematically calculated using calculus, and calculus can certainly explain the interconnectedness of these things, but it is unreasonable to say that a fruit-fly uses calculus to fly. If fruit-flies use calculus then so do amoebas.

    1. Re:Time, distance, motion, acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      This is nothing. My desk lamp does REAL-TIME ray tracing!

      Especially when I put a couple reflective spheres on a checkerboard underneath it.

  7. Re:how calculus? by TurboStar · · Score: 5, Informative

    Can you or anyone explain how what the neurons are doing is "calculus"?

    Calculus is how we scientifically communicate nature to each other, not away for nature to implement mathematics. Flies are not doing calculus any more than you catching a thrown ball is doing calculus. This headline, and perhaps the grant proposal, is written for stupid people. I hope this explains it for you.

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

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

  9. no more than by Chrisq · · Score: 2

    no more than a football player does calculus when changing course to intercept the ball.

    1. Re:no more than by hawkinspeter · · Score: 2

      Yes, you should be carrying a slide-rule.

      --
      You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
  10. Re:how calculus? by GrumpySteen · · Score: 2

    you catching a ball is way, way more calculus.

    It really isn't. Catching a thrown ball requires practice, during which you learn more or less how a ball moves after being thrown without any actual understanding of the math behind it.

    If you were doing calculus, you'd know exactly where the ball was going as soon as you saw it moving and you could simply put your hand in the right place and wait for the ball to arrive.

    In reality, you get yourself into what looks like it might be the path the ball is going to take, then you constantly correct your position as the ball gets closer. It's more like a series of guesses where you're constantly told whether you're getting closer or further away from the correct answer and that is not calculus.