Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 73 posts

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#21

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice"

First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is merely a single-cell organism [1]. Once you stop caring about the brain and neurons and you find out that almost every cell in the body has gap junctions and voltage-gated ion channels which for all intents and purposes implement boolean logic and act as transistors for cell-to-cell communication, biology appears less as something which has been overcome and more something towards which we must strive with our primitive technologies: for instance, we can only dream of designing rotary engines as small, powerful, and resilient as the ATP synthase protein [2].

[1] Michael Levin: Intelligence Beyond the Brain, https://youtu.be/RwEKg5cjkKQ?t=202

[2] Masasuke Yoshida, ATP Synthase. A Marvellous Rotary Engine of the Cell, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11533724

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#22

Post by phaedrus »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #21
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice" First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is…

I wonder if there's a step-change where single-celled animals with complex behavior are actually smarter than the simplest multiple-celled animals with a nervous system.

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#23

Post by danielheath »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

It definitely won’t happen without a massive overhaul of chip design; a design that optimises for very broad connectivity with storage for the connection would be a step in that direction (neural connectivity is on the order of 10k connections each, and the connection stores temporal information about how recently it last fired / how often it’s fired recently)

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#24

Post by fettnerd227 »

dvh wrote: post #14

The old neuroscience saying goes like this: "Human brain have billions of neurons and so it is too complex to understand, that's why neuroscience study simpler organisms. Flatworm's brain have 52 neurons. We have no idea how it works". Did finally something changed in this regard?

Not really.

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#26

Post by jononor »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

I think that learning to acquire new/additional training data would be a better first step towards learning agents, than trying to mutate its structure/hyper-parameters.

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#27

Post by outworlder »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #21
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice" First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is…

Indeed. All cells must do complex computations, by their own nature. Just the process of producing proteins and each of its steps – from 'unrolling' a given DNA section, copying it, reading instructions... even a lowly ribosome is a computer (one that even kinda looks like a Turing machine from a distance)

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#28

Post by smrtinsert »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…

Is it still a milestone for all NNs?

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#29

Post by OkayPhysicist »

lairv wrote: post #10

Is there any reason to believe that biologically inspired architectures should yield better performance ? Brain are biological systems which have been trained through evolutionary processes. Neural Networks are algorithmic/linear algebra models trained through statistical methods One might argue that CNN are biologically inspired, but it's more likely that the reason they work is because they respects input symmetrie…

We know, for a fact, that biological brains work. Not only do they work, they work enormously well learning and adapting based on dramatically less available data, utilizing vastly less resources than anything we've conceived of in artificial computing.

Biological architectures may not be the best possible, but empirical evidence demonstrates that they can result in intelligences ranging all the way up to sentience.

Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm

#30

Post by voxelghost »

comfypotato wrote: post #12
sillysaurusx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Is there a way to run it? One of the challenges with work like this is that you have to figure out how to get output from it. What would the output be? As far as my objection, it seems like an optimization, not an architecture inspired by the worm. I.e. “inspired by” makes it sound like this particular optimization was derived from studying the worm’s neural networks and translating it into code, when it…

See for yourself! There’s a simulator (have only tried on desktop) to run the worm model in your browser. As the name implies, the project is completely open source (if you’re feeling ambitious). This is the website for the project that produced the research in the article: https://openworm.org/ Nematodes make up much of this particular segment of the history of neuroscience. This project builds on lots of data produ…

>There’s a simulator (have only tried on desktop) to run the worm model in your browser.

The scientists gave it life, the hackers hugged it to death.

Post reply on HN