Escher Circuits: Using Vision to Perform Computation
In 2008, Mark Changizi, a Sloan-Swartz Fellow in Theoretical Neuroscience at Caltech, noted that the eye can make sense of complex relationships that often mystify the brain.
Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our cognitive powers are, in stark contrast, “slow and painful,” and we have great trouble with embarrassingly simple logic tasks.
Might it be possible to harness our visual computational powers for other tasks, perhaps for tasks cognition finds difficult?
In other words, could we trick the eye into performing computation?
Changizi proposed the Escher Circuit, "a special kind of image that amounts to 'visual software' our 'visual hardware' computes" merely through perception.
Escher Circuits work by creating different states corresponding to how the eye resolves ambiguous images. Its core component, the wire, holds a state of 0 when we perceive it as if we are to the right of it; otherwise, it holds a state of 1.
Although we can "flip" the wire visually back and forth in our head, it is difficult to hold both views at once (you can flip it easily by glancing at the 0 and then the wire, and then the 1 and back to the wire again).
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