Series-Portia-Spider on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

The Tragedy of the Uncrossed Campus

Sun, 24 May 2026 11:00:02 -0400

This is the third and final part of the series. If you haven’t read Part 1 and Part 2, the short version: a jumping spider with fewer than 100,000 neurons has a depth perception system so well understood that researchers have modeled it and proposed building a sensor based on it. Nine years later, nothing has been built. This part is about why.

I need to start with something that has been bothering me since I started researching this story.

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.

What a Spider Knows

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

I should be upfront: I am not a biologist or a neuromorphic computing researcher. I’m an engineer who fell down a rabbit hole reading comparative cognition papers and realized something didn’t add up. What follows is what I found, and why I think there’s an unexplored opportunity here that deserves far more attention than it’s getting.