[ExI] Portia Spider hunting Spiders on 600K neurons - Was: Bees are clever!

Claus Bornich clausb at gmail.com
Wed Apr 22 17:53:08 UTC 2015


Anders Sandberg  wrote:

> I have another new favourite smart arthropod, the Portia spiders.?
> http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html
>

Thank you for the link, enjoyed reading that. I too stumbled upon the
Portia in "Echopraxia". Anyone interested might find it easier to look for
"Firefall" which is Blindsight and Echopraxia in one volume.

I first discovered Peter Watts with the excellent, but very dark and
menacing, Starfish. Since then my awe for his work has only grown.
Blindsight is crammed with great and well researched ideas, unusual highly
transhuman characters (posthuman even?), clever plot and a great take on
consciousness and intelligence. Echopraxia was a bit less convincing in
parts, but still a good read with wonderfully researched ideas.

That the Portia seems to be able to build up a complicated path to its
target by sequentially scanning the landscape for up to an hour and then
spend as long traveling the complicated route without even seeing the
target, and all on just 600K neurons is fantastic.

Claus
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