Roses are red, are you single, we wonder? 'Cos this moth-brain AI can read your phone number

A pair of academics have reproduced part of a moth's brain as an artificial neural network – and taught it to recognize numbers to a fairly high accuracy with just a few training examples. The software, dubbed MothNet, can apparently discern handwritten digits with 75 per cent to 85 per cent accuracy, given 15 to 20 training samples of each number. That's not bad considering it takes thousands of training examples for more traditional neural networks to achieve 99 per cent accuracy. Its masterminds, Charles B. Delahunt and J. Nathan Kutz, both at the University of Washington in the US, built MothNet by modeling the olfactory network – the part of the brain that processes smells – found in the Carolina sphinx moth, also known as the tobacco hawk moth (Manduca sexta). That section of a bug's grey matter is relatively straightforward, we're told, making it ideal for experimentation.