This surprising simplicity has been a hallmark of the cybercricket project. The robot was conceived as a way to test the popular theory that phonotaxis needs two neural control systems-one to recognise a male's call and the other to locate it. This unexpected bonus raised the question of whether a real cricket's neural system is simpler than anyone had supposed. To investigate this, the team decided to see if the automaton could replicate other life-like behaviours. They played the robot two call songs that it could recognise.
Live crickets prefer songs with a faster syllable rate.
So did the robot. For a cricket to choose between two suitors, some biologists argue that crickets must have their preferences somehow encoded in their brains. But the robot showed this was unnecessary. The combination of the right auditory system and simple neural network selects call songs with faster syllable rates automatically. This suggested to Webb that her simpler neural system is the same as that of a living cricket.