Kevin K. <KK at _._> wrote:
> Harry Erwin wrote:
>> <snip>
>> My main problem with your view is the mismatch between the incredible
> power and complexity you claim for nerves/brains, versus the simplicity
> of the overt behavior of the organisms which have them. I don't see
> anything particularly complicated about the behavior of bats (or most
> people, for that matter!). Eating, defecation, regulation of the
> heartbeat, flying... Behaviors like these can be easily copied by simple
> programs.
Perhaps we haven't done enough in educating laypersons in ethology. It's
hard enough to simulate the behavior of Hermissenda (a sea slug).
Simulating something as simple as the dynamics of the stomatogastric
ganglion of the lobster has turned out to be intractable. Mammalian
behavior is well beyond intractable.
In many ways a bat is similar to a small primate. It has the complex
social behavior typical of mammals. Over its multi-decade life-span, it
has learned its own aerodynamics and acoustics and to discriminate the
prey types in its hunting range using acoustic cues. An individual
Eptesicus fuscus has a hunting range of several hundred square
kilometers, which it has learned in detail using a sensor with an
effective range of less than 10 meters. It has a distinct personality.
It recognizes individual bats (and in the lab, individual researchers).
It shows a strong tendency towards 'magical thinking'. It plays. It
expresses emotional states. It shows curiousity. It can learn to
communicate symbolically. An experienced bat can train a naive
researcher in the protocol for an experiment. All this with a brain with
a weight of about 1 gram.
In terms of algorithmic performance, Kalman filters tend to go boing
during violent maneuvers, while bats do very nicely at maintaining a
state consisting of position and velocity. Bats and dolphins show
detailed tracking and discrimination performance well beyond what we can
do with artificial sonars. Bats can resolve time to less than a 100
nanoseconds using neurons not much faster than ours. (Jim Simmons claims
less than 10 nanoseconds.)
--
Harry Erwin, PhD, <mailto:herwin at gmu.edu>,Computational Neuroscientist
(modeling bat behavior), Senior SW Analyst and Security Engineer, and
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, GMU. Looking--CV available at:
<http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin/CV.htm>
