Factual/professional/scientific knowledge in Claude 2

[alreadydone]

I wonder what sources Claude 2 got this knowledge from ... I read a bunch of articles about polyphemus moth online, but I didn't learn that they excrete brown liquid and wet frass tangled with leaf residues before spinning cocoons until I saw it happening multiple times ... perplexity.ai and Bing don't know about this, and can't find anything useful with Internet search, and ChatGPT (non-Pro) and Bard get very confused. I guess this is the effect of Claude 2 training on some proprietary database(s)?

Q: What happens to a polyphemus caterpillar right before it spins a cocoon?

Here are some key things that happen to a polyphemus moth caterpillar before it spins its cocoon:

• It stops eating and clears out its digestive system. The caterpillar will purge its gut and excrete any remaining waste as it prepares for the pupal stage.
  Its body elongates and becomes more cylindrical. The caterpillar's segments stretch out as it loses mass.
• It finds a suitable location to build its cocoon, often on a tree branch or trunk. The caterpillar anchors itself to the spot using silk threads.
  Its color changes. The green coloration of the caterpillar fades as hormones shift in preparation for metamorphosis. It takes on a more yellowish or brownish hue.
• Silk glands in its head enlarge and start producing liquid silk. The caterpillar will spin this silk into the threads of its cocoon.
• Its body contracts and wriggles as it spins its cocoon. The spinning process takes several hours as the caterpillar secretes silk and contorts to wrap the threads around itself.
• It sheds its final larval cuticle inside the cocoon. This last molt reveals the pupa that will develop into an adult moth within the cocoon.

So in summary, the caterpillar stops eating, holdfasts itself in place, changes color, enlarges its silk glands, and contorts itself as it spins silk into its protective cocoon in preparation for metamorphosis into a moth. The entire prep and spinning process takes around 1-2 days.

Q: Tell me more about how it clear out its digestive system.

Sure, here are some more details on how a polyphemus moth caterpillar clears out its digestive system before spinning its cocoon:

• It will stop eating for about a day before starting cocoon construction. This allows its gut to fully clear.
• The caterpillar's midgut (stomach) and hindgut will contract, pushing out any remaining plant matter or frass (insect feces) that was inside. This waste material is excreted as a dark liquid.
• With the help of circular and longitudinal muscles lining the gut, the caterpillar is able to forcibly purge and empty its entire digestive tract.
• Digestive enzymes and juices are absorbed back into the body as the gut contents are voided. This reclaims nutrients and conserves moisture for the pupal stage.
• The malpighian tubules, which are the excretory and osmoregulatory organs, will draw water and electrolytes back from the gut to the hemolymph (insect blood).
• With the gut emptied, the caterpillar will not need to feed again until it emerges from the cocoon as an adult moth. All the energy it needs is stored from its final larval feeding.
• Having an empty digestive system allows its body to detach the gut lining during the pupal remodeling process. The gut will reform during metamorphosis.

So in summary, the purge involves contraction of muscles to void all contents, reabsorption of fluids, and a cessation of feeding to prepare the gut for detachment and remodeling in the pupa. This clears the way for spinning the cocoon.

[alreadydone]

However this is one of Claude 2's failure cases (totally hallucination, cf. reference); ChatGPT and Perplexity at least know what it is, but neither could identify "mesa" as the Greek word for "within".

Claude's reasoning / mathematical capability is also disappointing, as in this example (Claude 1, Claude 2). ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing are able to understand the problem and suggest sensible ways of attack.

Q: What does "mesa" mean in "mesa-optimization"?

Mesa-optimization refers to a type of optimization algorithm inspired by mesa-shaped plateaus. The key aspects are:

• Mesa landscapes: The fitness landscape is visualized as a surface with flat plateaus at different heights representing areas of similar fitness, with steep cliffs between the plateaus. This is analogous to mesas rising up from a flat landscape.
• Plateaus represent local optima: The mesas represent locally optimal solutions, i.e. areas where making small changes to the solution would not improve fitness.
• Jumping between plateaus: The goal of mesa-optimization algorithms is to jump between the plateaus, representing escaping from local optima and finding different, higher-fitness solutions.
• Adding randomness: To escape local optima, randomness is introduced to shake solutions off plateaus and enable jumping to new areas of the fitness landscape.

So in summary, "mesa" refers to the mesa-like flat plateau landscape, and mesa-optimization algorithms use techniques like adding randomness to jump between these plateaus and escape suboptimal local optima. The term draws an analogy between a geographic mesa landscape and the ridges and valleys of a fitness optimization problem's search space.