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A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem

Sanjoy Dasgupta, Charles F. Stevens, Saket Navlakha
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/180471
Sanjoy Dasgupta
1University of California San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Engneering, La Jolla CA
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Charles F. Stevens
2The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, La Jolla, CA
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Saket Navlakha
3The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Integrative Biology Laboratory, La Jolla, CA
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  • For correspondence: navlakha@salk.edu.
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Abstract

Similarity search, such as identifying similar images in a database or similar documents on the Web, is a fundamental computing problem faced by many large-scale information retrieval systems. We discovered that the fly’s olfac-tory circuit solves this problem using a novel variant of a traditional computer science algorithm (called locality-sensitive hashing). The fly’s circuit assigns similar neural activity patterns to similar input stimuli (odors), so that behav-iors learned from one odor can be applied when a similar odor is experienced. The fly’s algorithm, however, uses three new computational ingredients that depart from traditional approaches. We show that these ingredients can be translated to improve the performance of similarity search compared to tra-ditional algorithms when evaluated on several benchmark datasets. Overall, this perspective helps illuminate the logic supporting an important sensory function (olfaction), and it provides a conceptually new algorithm for solving a fundamental computational problem.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 25, 2017.
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A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem
Sanjoy Dasgupta, Charles F. Stevens, Saket Navlakha
bioRxiv 180471; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/180471
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A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem
Sanjoy Dasgupta, Charles F. Stevens, Saket Navlakha
bioRxiv 180471; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/180471

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