X-Message-Number: 25615 From: Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 02:44:17 EST Subject: Re: The Limpinwood X-Prize K-space and butterflies From: Peter Merel <> > The pair of butterflies took off again and did another series of > arabesques, loops, twists, and flings. Then they landed right back > where they were before. The exact same grass blades. And this in a > stiff breeze after a thunderstorm. >I read that butterfly nervous systems have less than 3,000 neurons. Not >1 billion, like De Garis's planned "brain". Not even 75,000 like his >Xilinx models. Just 3,000, and most of them don't even control flight >muscles. But their interconnections can be mapped, if you like. It just >takes a microscope and some patience. Plus the willingness to undertake >the bad karma necessary to kill and dissect one of those little >beauties. Butterfly are insects and all insects have faceted eyes. These works as four-waves interferometers and produce data in a so called K-space. One dimensional K-spaces are lines segment with a centered point. Data near the center contain mostly contrast information and more distant points are more concerned with spatial resolution. K-spaces are used for example in magnetic resonance scanners. If the butterfly memorize both, the contrast and spatial complexity of its starting point, it has two points to recall in the K-space. To get back, it has find a picture whose the point pair position match what it has memorized. This task must take less than 3 000 neurons. So, it could be indeed implemented in an ANN. The next question is : why and how the butterfly get programmed with K-space software. The answer comes from the way 4-waves interferometers work. In one "snapshot" the picture definition is very bad but it improve as more snapshots are added. When the butterfly remains at the same place, the picture becomes more and more finely defined, : The resolving power get larger. When it fly and move from instant to instant, it can't accumulate a large number of snapshots and the world look blurred. If it get near its initial rest place, the K-space data can be partly superimposed on what it has memorized and the picture get clearer. So it gets back to that place because it is the only one outside the fog. Yvan Bozzonetti. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25615