Live data from Hacker News

An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain

neurokernel.github.io

1–10 of 19 posts

Re: An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain

#3
This is really cool. The other fruit fly project I was impressed by recently was Mihir Garimella's FlyBot: Mimicking Fruit Fly Response Patterns for Threat Evasion [1] which was a quadcopter that demonstrated evasive behavior. I really like looking at biomimicry implementations because there are so many levels on which to do it. Mimir was trying to mimic outwardly observable behavior while Neurokernel is trying to mimic neural pathways.

[1] https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/en/2014/6d1893c20...

Re: An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain

#7

This is really cool, also check out http://www.openworm.org/ which was started around the same time. I wish there was a comparison of the two projects.

These projects are amazing, and I only wish I knew about them a few years earlier. I studied C. elegans quite a bit when I was in school, and I also worked with D. melanogaster for a genetics project. I wonder how OpenWorm will help shape research in the years to come as it matures. It's a really nice surprise to see useful, open software that it so pertinent to the things I spent so much time studying - I hope I can still reach the people who picked up on my old projects and share these tools with them.

Re: An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain

#10
This is very important. When people talk about emulating/uploading human brains, they extrapolate computing power and scanning to a point ~2040 when we will have the capability. But guess what, we have the capacity to upload a roundworm now or a fly and have tried to, and we cannot. Wy? it seems that there is something we are missing and most likely it's the science. tl;dr we need to understand brains better before we can upload a human or a fly, this kind of project will get us there.
Post reply on HN