Microcontrollers (MCUs) have a memory range of 1-megabyte to 4-megabytes, so AI in a MCU should be as useful as a jellyfish or a snail. Not much intelligence would you say? Well, let's look at it twice: Snail and jellyfish can feed themselves, move, reproduce and hide when they feel threatened. They manage complex interactions with the environment, recognize patterns and control their body to create motion. This level of intelligence is enough for simple devices, like thermostats, vacuum cleaners, and doorbells. The idea here is to have devices that make micro-decisions based on the sensing of their environment. A device with a snail brain could at least recognize some micro-patterns, the same way a snail identifies what to eat and what to fear. Imagine a door lock identifying an attempt to tamper with it, or a washing machine defining its program by the color of your clothes. Animals, even ones with lower intelligence, are incredibly skilled at one thing that seems to evade computers: Interaction.

You would think that if you were to develop an AI system or a brain of a robot that it would be highly complex. After all with all the different things we can think of and when it comes to problem solving, it would certainly involve complex algorithms and programming, right? However it seems that a recent discovery has suggested that maybe less is more. Scientists at the University of Sussex have discovered that snail brains could be the key to helping develop smarter robots. The scientists attached electrodes to the brains of snails and according to their findings, the snail only used two brain cells to make complex decisions.