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I’m skeptical that the mushroom is in any way “learning to crawl”. It looks more like the mushroom naturally produces signals in response to light, and the robot triggers a walk cycle when it sees that signal.
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Would you describe that situation as the mushroom learning to dab?
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Still, a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking. It could easily not even know what walking means, just know that there's food when it tells mom to go to the kitchen. I used to ask my grandmother for "plain water" because she always brought me milk. I was very disappointed when I asked someone else for plain water, because I had no idea why grandma's was better.
> a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking. How is that any different from a brain telling its body to walk?
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> a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking. How is that any different from a brain telling its body to walk?
Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all…
Human brains cannot monitor gravity. We're actually very bad at it.
Also you're failing to understand the scaling involved here, so to speak. I'm actually really not interested in trying to explain this if you can't be bothered with spending a few minutes on how nervous systems work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking. How is that any different from a brain telling its body to walk?
Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all…
>Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity Human brains cannot monitor gravity. We're actually very bad at it. Also you're failing to understand the scaling involved here, so to speak. I'm actually really not interested in trying to explain this if you can't be bothered with spending a few minutes on how nervous systems work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all…
Let me rephrase: what's the difference between a child telling their parent to walk and the conscious part of your brain telling the unconscious part to walk? (BTW, I agree that the mushroom isn't learning anything. My point is just that a child communicating with their parents is not a good analogy.)
Another "fun" science trick here[0] demo here[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrobotics [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_7LUszWRqco
Does dead trout swimming upstream not count? doi:10.1017/S0022112005007925 (open access link: https://www.liaolab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2006Beal_...)
I’m skeptical that the mushroom is in any way “learning to crawl”. It looks more like the mushroom naturally produces signals in response to light, and the robot triggers a walk cycle when it sees that signal.
As a fungophile who spends way too much time crawling around in the woods looking for mushrooms, I think fungus learned to crawl before we did.
What could possibly go wrong?
This seems to be one of the researches from Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell Univ. https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/ https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-co... I believe that "learn" is a bit too strong word here. The fungi is essentially a UV light sensor. The researchers made a robot that moves in a certain way based on the biological signal. So the mushroom is more like a passive sensor then an acti…