What do a fruit fly and a search engine have in common? This isn’t some weird joke, but a serious line of inquiry by scientists at the Salk Institute and UC San Diego. Search engine algorithms go through great pains to match items you’ve clicked on or purchased, songs you’ve listened to, or things searched for, to similar ones.
As a result, we constantly need ever faster and more efficient search engines, and so computer scientists must work tirelessly to keep up. They have to constantly tackle what they call “a fundamental machine learning problem: approximate similarity (or nearest-neighbors) search.”Turns out, fruit fly brains go through a similar matching process, and the way they do it is fast, efficient, and dare I say, elegant. It occurs in the fly’s olfactory circuit and is what could be called a neural algorithm. It operates as a variation of what is known as locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). Hashes are a kind of shorthand used to quicken searches by limiting the amount of information known about each item.
Instead of having a number of different kinds of cats let’s say, bunched together, where it’s hard to pick out a specific breed, you put them all in the cat hash or container. Now you’ve got one bin essentially that holds all the cats. So when the algorithm is asked to search for a Siamese, instead of searching through all information available, which would be timely and cumbersome, it goes directly to the cat hash and pulls out the fussy fur ball.
Nature performs a search differently. The fruit fly’s olfactory circuit works by ascribing neural operating patterns to items which have a similar smell.
Though we’ve known how these circuits work for some time, this is among one of the first studies to show a direct correlation between neural circuits and how algorithms process information. It’s also the very first to outline how such a process could be used to speed up and innovate search engines for future computers.When a fly identifies a new smell, it can quickly tailor its behavior, depending on experiences with a similar odor in the past. The innovation here is that a fruit fly’s brain uses a non-traditional approach, a three computational process, which is more…
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