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Taking lessons from a sea slug, study points to better hardware for artificial intelligence:

For artificial intelligence to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug.

A new study has found that a material can mimic the sea slug's most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms.

The study, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a team of researchers from Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Georgia and Argonne National Laboratory.

"Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism's survival," said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of materials engineering. "We want to take advantage of that mature intelligence in animals to accelerate the development of AI."

Two main signs of intelligence that neuroscientists have learned from sea slugs are habituation and sensitization. Habituation is getting used to a stimulus over time, such as tuning out noises when driving the same route to work every day. Sensitization is the opposite – it's reacting strongly to a new stimulus, like avoiding bad food from a restaurant.

Zhen Zhang, Sandip Mondal, Subhasish Mandal, Jason M. Allred, Neda Alsadat Aghamiri, Alireza Fali, Zhan Zhang, Hua Zhou, Hui Cao, Fanny Rodolakis, Jessica L. McChesney, Qi Wang, Yifei Sun, Yohannes Abate, Kaushik Roy, Karin M. Rabe, Shriram Ramanathan

DOI https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2017239118

Original Submission