Autonomous Research with AI: "Not all who wander are lost" — can a UAV learn a city by heart, with no GPS, no map on board, just a $10 flight computer?
Yes! An AI agent running an autoresearch loop of 109 experiments ($487) found a special-purpose neural memory architecture that ‘remembers’ an exact geo-location from an in-flight daytime picture of Berlin — even on a photograph of the city it never saw in training. No GPS, no internet, no map on board, just a 31.7 MB file of weights that works on 93.0% of camera frames; 95 of 100 flights arrive within 100 m.
The research in eleven slides
