Ask A Genius 443 – Intelligence and Minimal Feedback Systems (2)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/14
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Rick Rosner: You can have moths. Moths may have some idea of space, still; moth space is, maybe, still 3-dimensional but doesn’t have much in it. They have reacting to light, navigating via light sources, and so on.
Bugs are often fatally attracting to street lights. They are attracted to light whose angle to the bug does not depend on changes in the bug’s location. If you’re navigating via the Sun, your angle to the Sun doesn’t change.
It is in the same location in the sky relative to you because it is so far away from you. But if you move from the streetlight, since it is so close, and you move, your angle to the streetlight moves
You are drawn into this fatal spiral of bouncing off the streetlight because your navigation system doesn’t understand the nearby light sources.
Anyway, in a moth’s picture of the world, you have the source of light, which has a position in space; you’re navigating by the light, the food odors, maybe some visual signals, but it is underpopulated and under-understood space. Intelligence in non-biological systems is the ability to model, understand, and react.
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