They're not really "natural computers". What brains do really well is calculating heuristics. For example, "that smells bad, I probably shouldn't eat it". That's very different from asking an animal to calculate the optimal eating strategy given a pile of food. Calculating hash values requires exact computation and it's a tractible problem, meaning it can be done efficiently by machine, so it's not something moths are going to be better at.
Curiously, the things brains tend to be really good at are often NP-hard problems if you require the optimal solution. But this is really just a curiosity because brains don't calcualte the optimal solution and what they do calculate is good enough. So the question for me is whether we should even be trying to do any of this stuff with computers in the first place. You might be on to something there. Imagine a self-driving car controlled by moths reacting stimuli...
Comments
They're not really "natural computers". What brains do really well is calculating heuristics. For example, "that smells bad, I probably shouldn't eat it". That's very different from asking an animal to calculate the optimal eating strategy given a pile of food. Calculating hash values requires exact computation and it's a tractible problem, meaning it can be done efficiently by machine, so it's not something moths are going to be better at.
Curiously, the things brains tend to be really good at are often NP-hard problems if you require the optimal solution. But this is really just a curiosity because brains don't calcualte the optimal solution and what they do calculate is good enough. So the question for me is whether we should even be trying to do any of this stuff with computers in the first place. You might be on to something there. Imagine a self-driving car controlled by moths reacting stimuli...