7 ms·
Box jellyfish demonstrate learning ability
- esafak 3y agoI think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you pardon the pun. Retrieval becomes faster, which is adaptive, and the body can protect it more easily if it is concentrated in one area, which enables internal specialization. If you can't protect the organ, the adaptive response is to make it redundant, rather than specialized.
- serf 3y ago>I think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you pardon the pun. even we humans don't really do that entirely. the gestalt of different nervous systems that interconnect between themselves and our brain appear to be responsible for a significant portion of the constellation of traits associated with learning.
- dtgriscom 3y agoEvolution doesn't care what seems smart or efficient; it just cares about what works.
- l33t7332273 3y agoThat’s true, but it’s also true that what’s efficient generally works _better_ than what isn’t.
- rbanffy 3y agoOTOH, a redundant brain is more resilient. These things have been around since well before we decided to have bones (and brains) and that alone proves the worth of this approach. I doubt we'll ever find a very smart jellyfish, but I hope no box jellyfish decides I am a threat. Or a treat.
- rbanffy 3y agoIt also doesn't care too much about what's better when good enough is sufficient.
- adrian_b 3y agoIf all the neurons of a brain would be distributed uniformly in the entire body, keeping the same connectivity, there would be no difference in the behavioral abilities of any animal (except the reaction speed), even if it would not have any recognizable brain. There are two reasons why all animals with a great number of neurons concentrate them into ganglia, and eventually into a single big brain. The first is that when moving most of the neurons close together the total length of the interconnections between them becomes much smaller, so a much less quantity of materials is needed to build them. The second is that the speed of signal transmission on the interconnections between the neurons is quite low, so when the interconnections become shorter, i.e. the nervous system becomes more concentrated, the propagation times decrease and the speed of reaction of the animal increases. The very low speed of signal transmission is why all animals have the main brain in the head, close to the most important sensors. For a humanoid robot, the speed of light for signal transmission makes irrelevant where the brain is located. Instead of having the brain in the head, a better position is in the chest, where it can be better protected. So what is seen in many SciFi movies, where humans completely disable some killer robots by cutting or shooting their head, would be unlikely to work against a correctly designed robot.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI disagree with you but more importantly, so what if you're right. Are you going to design a proper brain for these jellyfish, or advise them to evolve one? What you say is just so totally non-actionable and uninformative as to be entirely useless.
- uoaei 3y agoThat's a good point. But there are throughput considerations at the boundaries to the things that the brain wants to control. It makes most sense to centralize logic, and to delegate specialized control out to subsystems only where those specializations are relevant. Essentially making interfaces for control of appendages into APIs where the finer control logic is hidden from the main orchestrator. Exceptions exist where extra control at high levels is warranted (e.g. digits).
- dang 3y ago[stub for offtopicness]
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- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20230923200015/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/science/jellyfish-learning-neurons.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230923200015/https://www.nytime... https://archive.ph/vGJjh https://archive.ph/vGJjh
- runjake 3y agoWhile box jellyfish are fairly simple creatures when compared to mammals, I’m waiting for the inevitable study “announcing” that animals have their own thoughts, dreams and emotions. Something people who’ve been around animals will respond with “duh”.
- ben_w 3y agoEdit: I clearly wasn't clear, this comment is focussing on the question as applied specifically to box jellyfish, not animals in general. Emotions (at least the physiological part, not the qualia) wouldn't surprise me at all even for the simplest of neural structures. Might even be a pre-neural thing, given plants have a transmissible chemical signal to make other nearby plants more bitter in response to being eaten. Dreams and thoughts? I won't say "no", but I will say that if you can prove it, then we probably have to start caring about the welfare of even very small AI such as OCR systems made by second year university students encountering MNIST and python for the first time.
- justrealist 3y agoNot commenting on the ethical implications, but it's fairly obvious that dogs dream. We could tell our dog was chasing squirrels in his sleep by the running and yelping.
- qup 3y agoIncredibly obvious. One could say we can't prove it, but it's a fact and I don't need it proven scientifically. Anyone who had been around my dog would know it. I have no idea if all dogs are the same, in that they act out their dreams--but mine does, and it's unmistakable.
- pierat 3y agoI've seen my cat wake up startled, and hissing and fur straight up, because of a nightmare. She saw us, and knew she was alright.
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- doctor_eval 3y agoGreat, as if box jellyfish aren’t bad enough, now it turns out they can think, too.
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- bsima 3y agoWhy is this shocking? Evolution itself is a learning system
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- aranchelk 3y agoEvolution is a process that blindly accumulates beneficial mutations, that seems somewhat different from learning. It’s easy to prove that just because a process is driven by a characteristic doesn’t necessarily mean the output of that process would also. Example: when I grocery shop while hungry, that hunger may cause me to make irrational decisions, but the collection of items I buy aren’t themselves hungry.
- argiopetech 3y agoLearning is the mostly blind accumulation of knowledge that will hopefully be beneficial (and not detrimental to the excess of that benefit, which is not a given) in the future. Targeted study is the exception, even for humans. This is also a somewhat better description of evolution than yours because benefit in excess of detriment is not a guarantee and the process is not blind (because animals breed selectively).
- bsima 3y agoYes and what’s more is that natural selection is a loss minimization function, similar to gradient descent
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoEvolution is alive? Learning? What exactly is evolution anymore?
- uoaei 3y agoI am honestly surprised to see this downvoted on HN. Everything is a learning system in the thermodynamic sense. Hint: ML is just thermodynamics re-implemented in software.
- adolph 3y agoI wonder how the mechanisms of learn and infer in box jellys can inform designs of low energy narrow focus ML, like a toaster that associates a specific person with a specific toastiness rather than operating by time.
- matrss 3y agoHonestly, it would be enough if toasters could operate by "toastiness", instead of time, at all. We had that decades ago and then just stopped, I guess? I have watched too much Technology Connections... /rant
- astrange 3y agoJust get a Balmuda.
- matrss 3y agoThat thing is almost as big as my microwave and could replace halve of an oven. But I guess it does toastiness. I wish someone would just build a new toaster that works like the sunbeam radiant control ones, which would be useable on 230V (the issue I have with getting an old one).
- andrewstuart 3y agoFYI if you're not Australian ..... box jellyfish is one of the most deadly creatures on earth. Because of box jellyfish you cannot swim at any beach in northern Australia - you risk death if you swim at any beach anywhere from Gladstone in Queensland upwards. Same thing with saltwater crocodiles. Anywhere north of Gladstone you take your life in your hands if you swim cause a salty might eat you, literally. Worst case you get stung by a box jellyfish then eaten by a saltwater crocodile. No swimming!
- cushpush 3y agoStay aground in Oz and all you have to fear is getting talked into drinking goon
- andrewstuart 3y agoOn land you'll very likely be bitten by a redback spider, fall over onto the nest of a funnelweb spider which will also bite you and as you roll away in agony you'll roll onto a nest of tiger snakes, death adders, taipans and brown snakes. Leaping up to run away you'll very likely run in a Gympie Gympie tree whose leaves are covered in fine, silica-tipped hairs that release a potent neurotoxin when touched. Australia is a dangerous place. Best to stay inside programming.
- m3kw9 3y agoIt will be another 300 million years before it evolves to be like how moneys were
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- karim79 3y ago"The box jellyfish actively hunts its prey (small fish), rather than drifting as do true jellyfish. They are strong swimmers, capable of achieving speeds of up to 1.5 to 2 metres per second or about 4 knots (7.4 km/h; 4.6 mph).[19] and rapidly turning up to 180° in a few bell contractions.[4] Some species are capable to avoid obstacles.[4]" [0] So wasn't this already, sorta known? If they can do that, then surely they've some notion of what is worth chasing after, and have demonstrated the ability to differentiate between something nourishing (like small fish) from something like an iPhone someone accidentally dropped off of the side of a boat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_jellyfish#Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_jellyfish#Australia
- pvg 3y agoThese need not be learned behaviours. You don't learn to breathe or to not-breathe water, for instance.
- zoky 3y agoNot necessarily. Their nervous system could have simply evolved in such a way that it is hardwired to go after anything that seems like a small fish.
- stevenwoo 3y agoThere was a classic study that showed what we humans might intuitively think how brains and vision should work was wrong, at least with frogs - TLDR - their eyes do processing/filtering (one channel - is this thing in field of vision possible prey?) on input before sending some higher level signal to the brain https://phdcns.sissa.it/publication/what-frogs-eye-tells-frogs-brain https://phdcns.sissa.it/publication/what-frogs-eye-tells-fro...
- Obscurity4340 3y agoOh, the puns that are to come. Its like God out of the box jellyfish.
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- intimidated 3y ago> Going further, the researchers removed visual neurons from the box jellyfish and studied them in a dish. The cells were shown striped images while receiving a small electrical pulse to represent collision. Within about five minutes, the cells started sending the signal that would cause a whole box jellyfish to turn around. > “It’s amazing to see how fast they learn,” said Jan Bielecki a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physiology at Kiel University in Germany, also an author of the paper. Could someone please explain this bombshell? Did visual neurons learn all by themselves in a dish? And how did the researchers know that the visual neurons would interpret "a small electrical pulse" as a collision? (I'm surprised visual neurons "know" what a collision is.)
- kmarc 3y ago> interpret "a small electrical pulse" as a collision They don't interpret as a collision. IIUC current models of instinctive behaviors and learning are built up from the assumptions that * if a source of event is "beneficial" (from a chemical, physical perspective, eg "food" / energy packet is there) then those cells, neurons, microorganisms are naturally selected which tend to approach / follow / capture that source * if a source of event is non beneficial (threat / chemical incompatibility etc) then those survive which avoid that source. Here it doesn't matter that the negative event is a "collision", eventually the organism('s building blocks) learn to avoid it.