[HN Gopher] What if Eye...?
___________________________________________________________________
What if Eye...?
Author : smusamashah
Score : 379 points
Date : 2025-02-14 00:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eyes.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (eyes.mit.edu)
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Dawkins gave a concise explanation of the evolution of the eye
| here as well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0
| wolfhumble wrote:
| He starts his lecture assuming: "suppose we start with an
| ancestor who didn't really have an eye at all but just a single
| sheet of light sensitive cells . . ."
|
| This seems like a very basic condition, and that going from 0
| to 'just a single sheet of light sensitive cells' is almost
| nothing. But of course that is not the case. Before that you
| would need (+++):
|
| 1) Photoreceptor Proteins 2) Functional nervous system or
| signal processing pathways 3) A machinery to translate the
| absorption of light into an electrical signal 4) A system for
| coordinating these signal with other parts of the organism . .
| .
| procaryote wrote:
| You could have 2 - 4 for other sensory cells, like heat or
| touch, and then be a single mutation away from sensing light.
|
| Iirc, some snakes have some heat sensing cells arranged in
| pits to give them a directional heat sense. If you did that
| with visible light instead of IR those pits would be what
| halfway to an eye would look like
| wolfhumble wrote:
| > sensory cells, like heat or touch
|
| Like light sensitive cells these would need a similar 1 - 4
| +++, so the point would really be the same.
| procaryote wrote:
| Not at all... If the question is "how could an eye
| evolve" it's reasonable to start from a baseline of a
| complex organism that has sensory cells but lack eyes or
| even light sensitive sensory cells.
|
| A cell sensing light can use the same type of nerves etc
| as other sensory cells, so there is no need to explain
| how a cell sensing light + a nerve + a central nervous
| system evolves in one step.
|
| If you wonder how a nerve could evolve for example, that
| is a different question. If you have two cells and they
| can exchange chemical signals, which is useful in itself,
| you have the start of a nerve.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I'm not sure that's correct for very basic multicell
| organisms. I'm no biologist, but I believe primitive systems
| wouldn't need these types of advanced pathways when light
| sensitive cells could just produce signaling compounds to
| drive the behaviour of the rest of the organism without
| necessarily requiring a centralised nervous system, akin to
| how single cell organisms orient themselves in their
| environment.
| jhedwards wrote:
| This is correct. Rhodopsin, for example, is a G-protein
| coupled receptor, which means that activation of the
| receptor triggers G-proteins inside the cell which can
| activate or inhibit any number of cellular processes.
| Gupie wrote:
| Single cell organisms can be light sensitive. Can move away
| or towards light. The signal cell erythropsidinium even has
| an "eye":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropsidinium
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Yes, these organisms are really complex even though they
| are unicellular.
| flir wrote:
| In the book that talk is based on (I think it might be The
| Blind Watchmaker?) he says (paraphrasing) that he's using the
| example to illustrate a process, and the exact start and end
| points don't really matter. If you prefer an earlier starting
| point, that's fine. Start with a single cell that can respond
| to light, or even earlier. The process still applies.
|
| If you're going to make that objection, you might as well
| head straight up the chain and aim for the biggest example of
| all: how does the first self-replicating molecule appear?
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| The point still stands that evolving an eye is going up a
| long gentle slope not climbing a tall cliff.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm having trouble figuring out what your objection is.
|
| If we're going to study an evolutionary process, we have to
| pick a starting point. "How an eye evolves from a single
| sheet of light sensitive cells" is particularly relevant
| because creationists like to claim that "half an eye isn't
| useful, so it couldn't have evolved".
|
| "How does a single cell evolve light sensitivity" is not a
| particularly hot button topic. Creationists don't drone on
| about plants.
| Verdex wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. At least in my experience there
| are two types of creationists. The ones who have integrated
| a non-belief of evolution into a core component of their
| religious beliefs. This type isn't going to listen to any
| argument for evolution so I don't know why time should be
| spent making arguments for them.
|
| The other flavor are the ones saying "wait a second
| microbiology is really complex, I'm not sure the standard
| evolutionary process cuts it here."
|
| Saying, "well let's just assume microbiology isn't a
| problem", isn't going to be compelling to them.
|
| It is an interesting endeavor, but with respect to the
| whole creationism vs evolution discourse it feels like a
| complete waste of time.
| tga_d wrote:
| Creationists don't argue things are generically "too
| complicated", they argue that there are structures in
| nature that aren't discoverable by progressive mutations.
| As Dawkins explains in the video, eyes are an extremely
| commonly cited example. I've never heard anyone argue
| that cells couldn't evolve photosensitivity, but I have
| heard plenty of people argue that eyes only work when
| they're fully functional, which is what Dawkins is
| explaining as untrue here (as is TFA). I don't find the
| idea of debating creationism especially likely to be
| fruitful overall, but answering the question "How does
| evolution explain the structure of eyes?", e.g., for an
| adolescent who is grew up in a fundamentalist household,
| seems entirely reasonable to address.
| dekhn wrote:
| I disagree with your presumptions.
|
| For exmaple, for #3, you say electrical signal. But cells
| normally use chemical, not electrical signals.
|
| For #1- nope, just need an enzyme or other thing that makes a
| pigment molecule, and something that can detect a chemical
| (re-use of an existing protein)
|
| For #2- no nervous system, and cells already have many
| internal signal processing systems.
|
| For #4- those already existed.
|
| Biology mostly just copies and re-uses systems that already
| exist. It's still incredible there was a path of mostly
| random events that led to fully formed eyes, though.
| hwillis wrote:
| Aha! But you have neglected steps as well, fetid ignoramus!
|
| You portray such a +++ animal as simple and obvious, but
| indeed in fact you would need (++++++):
|
| 1) adherins and cadherins to bind this sheet together 2) an
| organelle to produce and regulate the cellular proteins 3) a
| method to encode those proteins 4) a method to replicate and
| propagate that encoding so that new proteins can be encoded
| 5) start and stop codons and a method of duplication or
| recombination errors to allow for new copies of protein
| encodings to be created separately from old copies...
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Glad every video automatically full screened on iOS
| d0100 wrote:
| You can blame Apple for that. It's not fun having to patch 3rd
| party webviews so their videos won't jump out on PiP
| jer0me wrote:
| To the website author: add the `playsinline` attribute to your
| <video> tags.
| genewitch wrote:
| Does this also add support for ie6?
| IOUnix wrote:
| This is interesting. If nothing else to just have the
| visualization of the idea of how eyes evolved from a single light
| receptor. I've often heard of that in biology but this really
| makes the idea more tangible.
| bglazer wrote:
| Fun fact about eye evolution, the dark spot you see on a
| dragonfly's eye is not a pupil following you, or even a change in
| the eye itself. You're actually just looking directly down into
| the columns of the dragonfly's eye. They capture light so
| efficiently that they appear to be black. They're close to the
| absolute physical limit for efficiency.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| So dragonfly's hit a scaling law?
| kadushka wrote:
| Not a scaling law - a law of physics: how efficiently light
| can be captured by any optical system. Dragonflies capture
| ~99.7% of incoming light.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| They capture so strongly, not even light can escape, from
| behind the Schwarzfly radius.
| bglazer wrote:
| As another commenter mentioned, this is more like a physical
| limit for efficiency of light capture. However they also
| follow a scaling law of angular resolution versus
| diffraction. Smaller lenses means more blur from diffraction
| but smaller lenses also allow better angular resolution. Many
| insects with compound eyes follow this scaling law, having
| ther same (provably optimal) ratio of eye radius to lens
| size, despite having very different sizes of eyes. William
| Bialek is a biophysicist who uses this frequently as an
| example.
| bozhark wrote:
| but only dragonfly's also possess the optimum flight
| capabilities
| hammock wrote:
| Not sure I understand. Aren't human pupils black also because
| light goes in and doesn't come back out?
| hmottestad wrote:
| Would be interesting to know if dragonflies get red eyes when
| you take a picture of them with flash. Human eyes reflect
| some of the red light from the white flash, making it look
| like the pupil is red instead of black.
| seszett wrote:
| I guess you're being downvoted because people think this is
| obvious, but dragonflies won't get red eyes because they
| don't have red blood to reflect the light.
|
| Red eyes are also caused by a particularity of vertebrate
| eyes, which have their blood supply _in front_ of the
| retina.
|
| This is also the reason why you can sometimes see moving
| dots when looking at a bright, blue-coloured thing like the
| sky: your eye sees the whole capillaries filled with red
| blood cells, but the brain processes them out because
| they're always there. The large white blood cells then
| appear as "less red" dots in the processed-out streams of
| red, and the brain interprets them as bright dots.
|
| Insects have none of this, they don't have blood or blood
| vessels but a transparent haemolymph that doesn't really
| circulate through a complete circulatory system like us.
|
| So there really is nothing in front of the insects' light
| sensors to reflect light.
| wingspar wrote:
| Went camping recently, and used one of those head mounted
| flashlights. Walking around there were glowing spots in the
| grasses. Thought at first it was some sort of firefly.
|
| Upon inspection, it was the light reflecting off the eyes
| of spiders. Dozens and dozens of spiders everywhere in the
| grasses. Never could get a picture.
|
| So light does reflect from compound eyes, but in 'silver'.
| daemonologist wrote:
| The interesting bit (to me) isn't so much that they're black,
| but that you can see the compound eye at work. Each lens has
| a very narrow field of view and only appears black when the
| observer is within it, while a human pupil appears black from
| pretty much any angle because it's always using the one lens
| and aperture.
| boxed wrote:
| Human eyes are a lot bigger. It's much easier to have a
| shadow in a thing that is a few centimeters big, than it is
| in something half a millimeter deep.
| mgnn wrote:
| Tangential, but the visuals reminded me of the book Vehicles by
| Braitenberg (https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5b1c7c36-4582-49
| 62-a89d-...). Although, it's less about evolution and more about
| complex behaviours from simple systems.
| jaetee wrote:
| Love this book, thanks for reminding about it here!
| nomilk wrote:
| This is probably more a physics/CS question than a biological
| one, but how far off are we from having physics simulators good
| enough to try the types of experiments MIT did with the eye but
| for entire organisms? Presuming that will one-day be possible
| (i.e. the simulation takes earth's physics as inputs, and spits
| out organisms _vaguely_ similar to those found on earth), then we
| could presumably enter the physics of exoplanets and find out
| what their creatures might be like.
| MVissers wrote:
| Hah, I'm creating something like this right now as a hobby.
| Will open source it soon:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDePFvxj6Po
|
| I think we're quite far off if you want to model full organism
| complexity. But if you want to answer a research question you
| can model simpler versions today. Like this research team did
| around how vision evolves.
|
| By the way- As of recently, we were able to model C Elegans
| (flatworm) in 3D with all neurons and neurotransmitters. It
| reacted to virtual stimuli just like a real worm
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w). So
| single-organisms is already possible. But the evolution of
| these entities in 3D will take us a bit more time is my guess:
|
| Also I'm not a CS person, just an enthusiast.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Can the virtual flatworm's virtual actions be mapped to the
| physical sensors of a flatworm in the real world? Can we get
| the real world's flatworm to control any part of the virtual
| one?
|
| Can these two things interface yet is the question (virtual
| to real bidirectional interface), especially since you are
| suggesting we have a clone of it.
|
| If we do this experiment, what does that say about something
| doing an experiment on humans (humans control humans inside
| video games).
|
| Sounds insane right? Why would we ever do this? Well ... we
| have this perfect digital clone of a flatworm, what else are
| we going to do? There's a lot of evidence that humans would
| absolutely go down this rabbit hole until it's logical
| conclusion.
|
| One word: _Teledildonics_
|
| Anyway, the flatworm that is born into such an experiment
| would never know, or it would just be useless to know.
| :shrugs:
| utkarsh858 wrote:
| That's quite a cool project, but as a thought can the simple
| rules you started from... Are they simple enough? Like the
| rule which states that offspring will carry the traits of
| parents, so exactly what traits they carry. how are they
| carried. Are these rules simple enough?
| MVissers wrote:
| So they carry neural nets and evolve using the NEAT
| algorithm, which introduces slight variations: new
| connections and new nodes.
|
| Over time this allows fish to develop basic behavior such
| as searching for food, navigation a maze, etc.
|
| The only other 'useful' gene right now is around
| herbivore/carnivore digestion (0 to 1), which allows them
| to extract more energy from either meat or plant-food. Most
| of the time they actually develop specific behavior
| according to this gene.
|
| I don't really code in what offspring need to do beyond
| having slight variations to both factors described above,
| it kind of evolves randomly into more complexity (neural
| net + behaviors).
|
| Also importantly- I need to program an energy decay system
| and death if they run out. So basically: Energy source,
| energy decay and evolving neural nets that can give an
| organism the possibility to survive and evolve if they get
| more energy. And voila- Life emerges.
|
| Working on plants now, and again simple rules: Neural nets
| in the plants to mimic evolution of complex biological
| systems that evolve from generation to generation. And a
| light-based energy source and light-based energy capture
| system (leaves). My current (preliminary) experiments show
| that the plants start to look like trees over time to
| maximize energy capturing compared to competing plants.
|
| Looking to publish this once I have it a bit more refined.
| Douger wrote:
| I'm looking forward to seeing the source! How long have you
| been working on it?
| asimpletune wrote:
| Very cool channel. Thanks for sharing.
| harry-wood wrote:
| Simulating physics of muscles/skeleton structures has been done
| many times over, and I feel like the focus on eyes and vision
| is what makes this one interesting. Anyway it's quite a fun
| category of youtube video:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=simulating+evolution+muscles
| They tend to be two-dimensional or have other big
| simplifications. I guess trying to evolve a "real" organism
| explodes in complexity very quickly even if you ignore the
| "brain".
| djtango wrote:
| 10 years ago when I was still in academia, modelling more than
| 8 water molecules solvating an ion started to get
| computationally very expensive lol
|
| Depends how accurate you want your model. Pie in the sky
| thinking, we need quantum computing before I can imagine these
| kinds of simulations making sense
| crackalamoo wrote:
| Can machine learning accomplish the same? See e.g. Microsoft
| MatterSim
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/mattersim-a-
| de...
| _kidlike wrote:
| isn't that what Nvidia Omniverse is?
| crackalamoo wrote:
| Yeah, that's the ambition.
|
| More generally, ML is good at approximating many NP-hard
| problems efficiently, so I wonder if it will be a more
| practical alternative to quantum computing for things
| like molecular simulation.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Well, from a philosophical point of view you might say that
| it's impossible. The idea of laws that can apply to e.g.
| mathematics might not apply to organisms because organisms are
| described in terms of teleology. The heart doesn't just happen
| to circulate blood, it beats in order to circulate blood to
| oxygenate the body and so on.
|
| And just because, for example, organisms that live in cold
| climates generally have thick hair, having thick hair doesn't
| imply cold climates. Some mammals fill niches filled by birds
| in other ecosystem, or by fish in others. Likewise in New
| Zealand they have birds filling niches that in other ecosystems
| are filled by mammals.
|
| I'm not sure biology can be a purely inductive science.
| adrianN wrote:
| The answer ranges from ,,we could do that in the eighties" to
| ,,it's literally impossible" depending on the fidelity you wish
| the simulation to have.
| dsign wrote:
| So I guess it will be very hard, in a pure Darwinian meaning,
| to evolve an organism from scratch. But relax that meaning a
| little by fixing some things and letting only some things
| evolve, and I suspect it's already possible.
| fastball wrote:
| EDIT: went ahead and mirrored their website[1] for the time being
| while they figure it out.
|
| ---
|
| Website seems broken (repo deleted?), had to go here[2] instead.
|
| And here is the paper[3] the website is about.
|
| [1] https://cambrian.pages.dev/
|
| [2] https://eyes.mit.edu/ACI/
|
| [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15001
| kpush wrote:
| It's back up now, thanks for the quick mirror friend :)
| fastball wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up :)
| utkarsh858 wrote:
| I must say that I was expecting that a single light receptor
| would also have been evolved from something else so that the
| title would have earned the moniker of 'from scratch'.
| SamBam wrote:
| Hmmm... From my experience writing Artificial Life simulators in
| the 90s, there is so much that is dependent on the parameters
| that the simulation coders write into the models. Yes, if you
| build a Genetic Algorithm where you start with a photo-sensitive
| cell, and then you reward agents that are able to navigate a
| maze, you're going to end up "evolving" agents that use a bunch
| of photo-sensitive cells like an eye. Has that really told you
| something about evolution, about life, or about the simulation
| that you set up?
| wruza wrote:
| About the latter, obviously. You can't just test it as in
| physics, so that's all you can have. The proper question (I
| guess) is, is that knowledge completely useless or may it help
| with something down the line.
| nxobject wrote:
| I do think it's the third, _but_ I do also think it's different
| than the kitchen-sink organism simulations that really were
| just watching a lot of shallowly-programmed behaviors interact
| with each other. I think of it more of a model than a
| simiulation - a model that tries to explain a specific real-
| life phenomenon in as focused and parsimonious way as possible.
|
| Here, the takeaway is that the emergence of two different types
| of eye - compound and camera-like eyes - can be modelled by a
| set of 3 specific tasks, in combination with a minimal set of
| anatomical knobs and switches. Then it might actually be
| _informative_ to compare and contrast the clear evidence from
| the model, and see how these explanations compare to the less
| conclusive ones we can draw from the methods of evo-bio.
|
| (A good analogy would be to look at how gates, latches, and
| clocks can alone account for the "emergence" of modern
| superscalar microarchitectures, without having to resort to
| modelling the analog madness of pushing high frequencies
| through physical circuits, for example.)
| westurner wrote:
| From "An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow
| limbs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912925 :
|
| > [ mTOR, Muller glia in Zebrafish, ]
|
| From "Reactivating Dormant Cells in the Retina Brings New Hope
| for Vision Regeneration" (2023)
| https://neurosciencenews.com/vision-restoration-genetic-2318... :
|
| > _"What's interesting is that these Muller cells are known to
| reactivate and regenerate retina in fish," she said. "But in
| mammals, including humans, they don't normally do so, not after
| injury or disease. And we don't yet fully understand why."_
| whatever1 wrote:
| Are eyes that good at generating signal or our brain is just good
| at imagining things it does not see?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It imagines a lot. One of my biggest psychedelic takeaways.
| aqueueaqueue wrote:
| Optical illusions are a good indicator of this. I would say
| it compresses alot.
|
| Video codecs are good optical illusions too.
| boxed wrote:
| The blind spot is a big one.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| Eyes are good at generating the signal or we wouldn't have much
| use for the vision they do provide us.
|
| On a somewhat related note, due to a head injury I suffered now
| many years ago, I started developing small-ish blind spots
| "once in a while" that remain anywhere from a few minutes up to
| a few months.
|
| The spots are very noticeable when they first appear, grabbing
| the attention all the time. The ones that persist long tend to
| "disappear" when my brain filters out the broken (?) signal of
| where the blind spot appeared, and the spot mainly becomes
| noticeable again if it hides or interrupts a known pattern that
| I'm looking at.
|
| It's as if the brain fills the spot with the average color
| around it (blue sky - blue spot, white wall - white spot etc),
| which works well for single color surfaces and such but not
| great for repeating and predictable patterns. And the hiding
| "lags" which means if I quickly shift between colors then the
| spot will momentarily be visible as the old color shows up on
| the new color.
|
| So the brain does "imagine" things, but when it does, it isn't
| perfect.
| dod25 wrote:
| This is truly innovative! From the app name to how it works. I'm
| impressed
| fschuett wrote:
| In order for this to work in real life, you'd have to prove a lot
| of other invariants:
|
| - The mechanism to interpret the light data signal has to be in-
| step with the evolution of the eye. Getting light data without a
| brain evolving at the same time to interpret it is evolutionary
| recessive, i.e. a useless function. I.e. a real evolution would
| be more like "cat /dev/urandom > output.html", not a controlled
| ecosystem with a clear penalty-reward system.
|
| - In nature, there is no 1:1 "reward / selection function" like
| in this simulation. In the computer, this "motivation factor" is
| externally given, so that the next generation is rewarded and
| selected out, in reality, there is no rule as to what is and
| isn't "better" or "fitter" or "more attractive to the other
| gender" (not like CS nerds would know). Sure, an organism can
| consume food, but beyond a certain point that wouldn't make the
| organism just "fat", not stronger. So there also need to be
| environmental mutations happening at the same time, that
| reinforce "more food = better evolved".
|
| - There has to be a way for the animal to be so dominant, that
| the connection between light data and food can be genetically
| passed on and will not be associated with bad artifacts (see
| ChatGPT hallucinations for examples of "accidental bad artifacts
| in evolution" - and that "evolution" has millions of man-hours,
| money and R&D behind it).
|
| - By the rule of "survival of the fittest", the next generation
| mutation has to be (in one single step) such a significant
| improvement over the last one that it won't be selected out again
| by recessive selection or dilution inside of the gene pool.
|
| - The gene has to be active within 150 subsequent generations,
| without fail, cancer, recession and provide 150 times a dominant
| advantage, just to get a basic "eye" for 2D navigation with 10
| light sensors. The minimum snail eye (pre-Cambrian) has 14.000
| cells [1] (and a snail cannot see color).
|
| - The real world is a 3D environment, which adds a monumental
| amount of complexity. Add to it the complexity of depth, color,
| shape, ...
|
| - The mutation(s) have to happen either "at once" or be
| widespread (otherwise it's going to be like an Albino animal,
| i.e. some rare neutral mutation).
|
| - All of this has to be done in an environment hostile to life in
| general (i.e. the edge of underwater vulcanoes, some primordial
| soup burning at several hundred degrees), all elements have to be
| at the right place, at the same time, etc. And be created out of
| nothing, of course.
|
| While I do agree that it can be helpful for computer vision,
| computerized "evolution" is just adaptive statistical pattern
| matching, but it's absolutely nothing like real biology. It would
| be more realistic to just output "/dev/random > kernel-gen-
| xxx.iso" and then run it bare-metal, with no lab environment, no
| operating system, no programming language, no goal function, no
| selection / reward process, no debugging, etc.
|
| Even Darwin had his problems with the eye. The reason I believe
| in God is not necessarily because I want to, but because
| evolution (not survival-of-the-fittest, but the "mutation creates
| information" aspect) requires far more faith and far more dogmas,
| which cannot be questioned for the sake of science. When I was in
| 8th grade biology, I took a stone from the schoolyard, put it on
| the teachers desk and said "alright, so this is a human if we
| wait 4 billion years". The teacher ignored me, but never told me
| I'm wrong.
|
| [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00606433
| boxed wrote:
| You should read On the Origin of Species. He handled all your
| objections there.
|
| Spoiler warning: Darwin didn't really have any problems with
| the eye. That's just something creationists say.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| It would be interesting to read if there are anything in
| particular that you disagree with? Which objections did
| Darwin handle and where?
|
| Darwin's understanding of e.g. Heredity via Pangenesis turned
| out to be wrong, so it is not like just holding up a copy of
| 'On the Origin of Species' as the final judge of "origin
| reasoning" will take use very far.
| boxed wrote:
| He spends a long time dismantling objections I've heard
| creationists use to this day. I've often wondered if the
| creationist influencers who came up with these "objections"
| actually read On the Origin of Species.
|
| The mechanism wasn't understood at the time yea. That's not
| really relevant, and not really covered in Origin of
| Species anyway.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Blog post: https://eyes.mit.edu/project/what-if/what-if.html
| teekert wrote:
| Reminds me of Greg Egan's "Permutation City" (1994)'s
| "Autoverse". Highly recommended book if you like this article.
| thrance wrote:
| Seconded, I also deeply recommend "Diaspora", by the same
| author. It might be a bit more accessible than "Permutation
| City".
| teekert wrote:
| For as far as any Greg Egan's stuff can be called
| accessible... I guess in a way you could call a thrilling
| story with the theme: "What if human observation DIDN'T cause
| quantum wave function collapse" (Greg Egan: Quarantine) the
| same as making Quantum Mechanics "accessible" :D
|
| Same goes for many of Ted Chiang's stories!
| T-A wrote:
| For a shorter read, there's his "Crystal Nights":
|
| https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html
| teekert wrote:
| This looks very nice, do you know if there is an epub of
| this?
| settsu wrote:
| https://s8-hzde.freeconvert.com/task/67af828674bf6ba8db63d1
| 1...
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| My CS teacher in high school had a lesson with us about horseshoe
| crab's eye, which apparently does not see anything that is larger
| than the field of view of the eye, allowing it to consume smaller
| organisms and omitting larger organisms. We used a neural network
| model in excel for such purposes.
|
| He was (and hope he still is!) a great person, who taught me
| being curious and insightful in the computer science field.
| Taught me about Donald Knuth, TeX and many more things.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Does not see anything that os larger than the field of view?
|
| I can't conceptualise this. How? Surely this is the same as
| humans where if you had a big enough uniformly lit object in
| front of you, you couldn't "see" it?
| davedx wrote:
| Imagine if you only see things if you can see their edges.
| (most eyes do edge detection in the retina before signals hit
| the visual cortex)
| aryoung1 wrote:
| Author here, happy to answer any questions :)
| tbruckner wrote:
| What's the goal here? What do you plan on doing with this?
| aryoung1 wrote:
| We discuss it at the end of this blog
| (https://eyes.mit.edu/what-if/), but the main future goal
| would be to discover new types of eyes or vision systems. The
| results we show on the website generally agree with the
| conclusions from biologists, but what if we put the animal in
| an environment not actually feasible in the real world? Like
| what if we put an animal on a mars-like world, what kind of
| eyes would it evolve? And if we constrain that animal to only
| evolve eyes that we can manufacture (like a camera), would it
| discover a new type of camera or algorithm that's better than
| what humans have engineered? So here we show an attempt to
| recreate biological vision, but we're interested in applying
| it to artificial vision (i.e., computer vision, robotics,
| etc.).
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Maybe I just can't see the big picture (pun++) but why
| limit the simulations to the eye? Many other senses are
| simultaneously working for survival. I'm not aware of
| anything that just uses the eye for survival.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
| aryoung1 wrote:
| That's very true and is also an area of interest. The
| number of possible animals that can be evolved increases
| substantially with more parameters, so adding more
| sensors/types of sensors makes the problem even more
| difficult. Also our animals are simple balls, where most
| intelligent animals have arms, legs, so on. So modeling
| more would definitely be interesting, too!
| curtisszmania wrote:
| *CytoCync: Revolutionizing HealthTech*
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