Hacker Remix

Dragonfly's extreme loop-the-loops

131 points by pseudolus 5 days ago | 44 comments

sashank_1509 5 days ago

If we wanted to make a drone have the intelligence of a dragonfly (which might still be a decade away), we would at least need a billion parameters and a trillion tokens in training data. Just helps us appreciate what nature is capable of.

z2 5 days ago

Sounds about right, 1 million neurons and potentially 1 billion synapses. Back in school I used to think computers and machines were so advanced and complex compared to boring old biology. It was such a silly misconception to be so many orders of magnitude off in complexity.

jurgenaut23 5 days ago

Tokens? Is that the new « bit »?

_joel 5 days ago

I guess we're still not out of the 'flying into a window' stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition

noja 5 days ago

Is nature doing that? Or following a much simpler pattern?

thoroughburro 5 days ago

Producing complex behavior simply is usually harder and more elegant than using a lot of superfluous complexity.

sashank_1509 4 days ago

I feel pretty confident saying it is not following a simpler pattern. It is doing something very hard, with far less training data and a much more alien form of compute (which is also much slower in general than computers).

Is there some elegant learning algorithm in nature that enables this? Maybe. But I don’t think there’s any simplification of the task, that nature has found. For example, I doubt we will find a 100 line algorithm to do the motion the dragonfly did, or a simple physics equation to describe it etc. My intuition, stems from the bitter lesson, a lot of these tasks are irreducibly complex and trying to find elegant simple models, tends to be a waste of time.

tw04 5 days ago

Does the how matter if we can’t replicate it the same way?

stevenwoo 5 days ago

Not mentioned is the frame rate for data acquisition which can approach 300 frames per second equivalent so they kind of live through time a bit differently than we do. (Credit to An Immense World by Ed Yong)

meitham 5 days ago

That’s exactly the impressive part, the speed of doing these moves. The moves themselves on a lower speed is very common to see in fancy pigeons, though much slower

ahazred8ta 3 days ago

Although bugs can still have a 'what the F was that?' reaction, per the classic 'catapulting tiny pies at flying insects' video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nshKhqyqU (Millimetres Matter)

stronglikedan 4 days ago

I watched this cool video recently on dragonfly movement. Dragonflies Hunt by Predicting the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i9WMD6xbuA

mrbonner 5 days ago

In the summer, one of my "hobby" is just to sit in my backyard and watch a couple of dragonflies circles around, swoop down and catch flies/mosquitoes. They have a way to fly close, rendezvous with the targets and then just swoop down in all of a sudden to kill them. Fascinating animal! I could sit there and watch them in constant state of awe.

philk10 4 days ago

same, have a natural pond in my backyard and I can watch them all day