THE remarkable visual vocabulary of cuttlefish, which change the colour of their skin in a flash for communication or camouflage, is being catalogued with the help of a mathematical technique borrowed from signal processing.
Independent component analysis (ICA) was invented to untangle mixtures of signals. For example, it can pick out individual voices from the babble of a crowd. Now cuttlefish expert Daniel Osorio and his colleagues from the University of Sussex in Britain are hoping it can help them work out which basic elements cuttlefish use to build up their sophisticated patterns. They called in neuroscientist John Anderson, also…
