Simulated too? I assume that if you can map it then you can simulate it. Am I correct?
Simulating it would require many orders of magnitude more compute. Biological neurons are not just a sigmoid function.
An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#32Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type.
A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That 3 million edits will turn into 3 million * 10^6 at least manual edits, that doesn't seem feasible. The error rate on the fruit flu would have to come down into the single digits to be usable to map a human brain. So an improvement from about 6% of synapses to 0.000006%. That is one heck of a jump in improvement for an AI.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#33[deleted]
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#34Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type. A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That…
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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#35Simulated too? I assume that if you can map it then you can simulate it. Am I correct?
If I understand what you're asking for correctly, then no, not in any meaningful sense. This is the gross structural anatomy of a dead brain, which is a small but important step towards understanding dynamics.
Inference from structure to dynamics in a brain is several orders of magnitude less plausible than inferring from a record of local weather reports to simulating actual weather patterns.
Maybe a better analogy would be inferring from Grey's Anatomy to the regulatory dynamics of proteins at the cellular level in vivo (although I think that might actually be easier?)
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#36It was my understanding that all this connectome-based research was largely a deadend, because it doesnt capture dynamics, nor a vast array of interactions. if you've ever seen neurones being grown (go search YT), you'll see it's a massive gelatinous structure which is highly plastic and highly dynamic. Even in the simplest brains (eg., of elgans), you get 10^x exponential growth in number of neurones and their conne…
Connectome-adjacent neuroscientist here. Definitely not a dead end! But also definitely not the whole picture. One of the main open questions in neuroscience right now is how network structure, dynamics, and function are related in the brain. Connectomes provide tremendous insight into structure, but as mentioned this does not generically solve either the dynamics or function problem. For example, for many of these n…
How's Open Worm coming along? The connectome of C. Elegans has been known for years, and Open Worm tries to simulate it. [1] Not with enormous success.
[1] https://openworm.org/assets/OpenWormPoster_Celegans_Glasgow_...
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#3750 years from now I am dying in a hospital bed, the nurse informs me that my consciousness will be uploaded to a computer with all the other brains, a digital heaven if you will.
Get there and its full of flies.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#38Are all fruit fry brains the same? Does anyone know what has actually been mapped and why it would generalize from one fruit fly to the next?
The article describes it as slicing the fly brain into very thin slices, which are imaged by an electron microscope. Then you analyze the slice images and determine the neurons and their connection. This is the hard part, and the breakthrough is an AI based method. Pretty sure they've only mapped one brain so far.
Fortunately, the whole chain of slicing, imaging, and analysis are now at least partially automated, so in theory you can repeat the process with nothing more than some time on the equipment and a bit of compute.
In practice, I suspect there's a fair bit of grad student manual labor that keeps the pipeline flowing...
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#39There is this interesting past post: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36568609
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36568609 - July 2023 (94 comments)
The connectome of an insect brain by Winding et al. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35112234 - March 2023 (1 comment)
Map of an Insect’s Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111371 - March 2023 (119 comments)
The Connectome of an Insect Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094565 - March 2023 (1 comment)
The first wiring map of an insect's brain hints at incredible complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089298 - March 2023 (5 comments)
Fruit Fly Brain Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29672565 - Dec 2021 (1 comment)
Structure of Fruit Fly Brain (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26474430 - March 2021 (7 comments)
Google publishes largest ever high-resolution map of brain connectivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22124888 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
Explore the the adult fruit fly brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20015218 - May 2019 (1 comment)
To detect new odors, fruit fly brains improve on a well-known computer algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18656016 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)
A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Fruit Fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590910 - July 2018 (50 comments)
Fruit Fly Brain Hackathon 2017 – Brain Circuit, Memory and Computation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13692166 - Feb 2017 (13 comments)
Neurokernel: Emulating the Fruit Fly Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284802 - March 2015 (8 comments)
An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8377600 - Sept 2014 (17 comments)
Maybe also throw in:
Six Nobel prizes – what’s the fascination with the fruit fly? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15463522 - Oct 2017 (16 comments)
Fruit fly nervous system: new solution to fundamental computer network problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2103668 - Jan 2011 (13 comments)
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
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