[xyzzy123]

Spiders have much better hardware than the state of the art in low cost miniatuarised robotics.

However I'm not convinced that if you trained a deep net and gave it access to a spider's sensor suite and effectors, that it would do worse than an actual spider would.

A lot worse in terms of efficiency per watt, sure...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

How would you train that deep net? What data would you give it? What would you train it to do exactly?

[xyzzy123]

Survive. Reproduce. Just like the video games nets are already trained to play, there's a pretty clear scoring function. The inputs would be spider sensorium, the outputs would be spider effectors.

I'm kind of waiting for someone to do this already with C elegans by excising their 300 or so neurons and replacing them with a GPU and laser (but I imagine the practical impediments are way higher than I handwavingly imagine).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The inputs would be spider sensorium, the outputs would be spider effectors.

That sounds great on paper. In practice, how do you even begin to collect "spider sensorium"? fMRI?

As to "spider effectors" I'm pretty sure we don't have the tech to do that yet, at least not in spider-scale (excluding Giant Spiders of Doom).

On paper, you can approximate any function with a multi-layer perceptron with enough layers. In practice, "enough" layers may be infinite and you'd need infinite amounts of data infinitely difficult to collect.

[xyzzy123]

I think the most reasonable near-term approach "if you had to do it" would be reverse engineering and virtualities, but please bear in mind it was a hypothetical to begin with.

I expect the number of inputs to spider sensorium would be low thousands of analog inputs. To be clear I can't cite a reference for this.

Yes it seems intractibly difficult on paper but spider hardware can do it.

It's hard to rate what we'll expect from self driving cars on the flatworm to spider spectrum (probably closer to the flatworm end, but the cameras add an interesting dimension), but clearly reasonable yet ambitious people believe these problems are tractable with sufficient effort.