How Fruit Fly Brains Are Improving Smart Phone Apps

What do a fruit fly and a search engine have in common? Search engine algorithms go through great pains to match items you've clicked on or purchased, songs you've listened to, or things searched for, to similar ones. As a result, we constantly need ever faster and more efficient search engines, and so computer scientists must work tirelessly to keep up. They have to constantly tackle what they call "a fundamental machine learning problem: approximate similarity (or nearest-neighbors) search." Turns out, fruit fly brains go through a similar matching process, and the way they do it is fast, efficient, and dare I say, elegant.