Fruit Fly Brain Patterns Can Improve Algorithms that Power Netflix, Youtube Recommendations

Researchers have ventured into uncharted territory to find ways to improve computer algorithms -- the brains of fruit flies. While search algorithms work by analyzing users' previous searches, a fruit fly searches for fruits by remembering the odor of the fruit they have fed on. "This is a problem that pretty much every technology company with any kind of information retrieval system has to solve, so it's been something that computer scientists have studied for years. Now, we have this new approach to similarity searches thanks to the fly," said Saket Navlakha, assistant professor at Salk's Integrative Biology Laboratory and lead author of the research paper titled "A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem." The paper was published in the Science Journal on Thursday.