[ExI] Building a honeybee brain

[BillK]

How A.I. bumblebee brains could usher in a new era for navigation
By Luke Dormehl November 28, 2020

<https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/ai-bee-brain-opteran/>

Quotes:
The brain of a honeybee is orders of magnitude smaller and technically
more simplistic than a human brain. A human brain has, as far as we
are aware, somewhere in the order of 86 billion neurons, and a volume
of 1,274 cubic centimeters. A honeybee brain has 1 million neurons and
is about the size of a pinhead.

Honeybees might seem simpler — and, in a very real sense, they are —
but reverse engineering a bee brain isn’t about low-hanging fruit with
no practical application. Marshall said that bees are “consummate
visual navigators, [adept at] long-distance navigation, with very
sophisticated learning abilities. They’re much more than the simple
kind of reactive automata that people often think insects are.
Individually, they’re very clever.”

Previous research has suggested that honeybees are able to solve
challenges such as the traveling salesman problem (in their case,
finding the shortest route between flowers discovered in a random
order) in a fraction of the time that it would take the world’s top
supercomputers. Building a honeybee brain in silicon could therefore
help develop sophisticated navigation tools that could be lightweight,
ultra-low-powered, and orders of magnitude more efficient than the
deep learning approaches,” said David Rajan, CEO of Opteran. The
company’s technology could power future drones, autonomous vehicles,
and various robots.
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Sounds a good way to go!

BillK