
How a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in Its Head - leptoniscool
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/
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piokoch
I wonder how this is possible. Do these birds have enough neurons to store
such amount of information? Maybe they use some kind of super compression that
we are not aware of.

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tim333
Random googling indicates brains have about 10^9 synapses per cubic mm. Say
one byte = ten synapses then that's 100mb / mm3. Say one hiding place gets
encoded in 100 bytes. That's potentially 1 million hiding places / mm3. So it
probably doesn't need super compression.

It'd be interesting to figure how the thing works though.

I hazarding a guess at some sort of image recognition. If you went to a hiding
point, took a snap with your phone and returned next year you could probably
locate the spot by moving until the relative positions of trees etc in the
image were the same. Something like that perhaps?

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DrScump
... but it _cannot_ carry a 1-pound coconut.

