The Silicon Spider

Sun, 24 May 2026 11:00:01 -0400

Last time, we met Portia, a jumping spider that plans hour-long hunting routes, learns by trial and error, and manipulates mental images with fewer than 100,000 neurons. We ended on a provocation: one of Portia’s capabilities, its depth perception system, has been studied at the optical level, computationally modeled, and explicitly proposed as a sensor template. And nine years later, nobody has built it.

Depth-Sensing on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

The Silicon Spider