by Peter W McOwan and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
(from the archive)
By understanding the way hoverflies mate, computer scientists found a way to sneak up on humans, giving a way to make games harder.
When hoverflies get the hots for each other they make some interesting moves. Biologists had noticed that as one hoverfly moves towards a second to try and mate, the approaching fly doesn’t go in a straight line. It makes a strange curved flight. Peter and his student Andrew Anderson thought this was an interesting observation and started to look at why it might be. They came up with a cunning idea. The hoverfly was trying to sneak up on its prospective mate unseen.
The route the approaching fly takes matches the movements of the prospective mate in such a way that, to the mate, the fly in the distance looks like it’s far away and ‘probably’ stationary.
How does it do this? Imagine you are walking across a field with a single tree in it, and a friend is trying to sneak up on you. Your friend starts at the tree and moves in such a way that they are always in direct line of sight between your current position and the tree. As they move towards you they are always silhouetted against the tree. Their motion towards you is mimicking the stationary tree’s apparent motion as you walk past it… and that’s just what the hoverfly does when approaching a mate. It’s a stealth technique called ‘active motion camouflage’.
By building a computer model of the mating flies, the team were able to show that this complex behaviour can actually be done with only a small amount of ‘brain power’. They went on to show that humans are also fooled by active motion camouflage. They did this by creating a computer game where you had to dodge missiles. Some of those missiles used active motion camouflage. The missiles using the fly trick were the most difficult to spot.
It just goes to show: there is such a thing as a useful computer bug.
More on …
Related Magazines …
- Issue 4 – Computer Science and Biolife
- Biology loves technology
- Issue 26 – Peter W McOwan: Serious Fun
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1, and through EP/K040251/2 held by Professor Ursula Martin.
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