A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
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Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#2I just realized this was from 2004. Ah well, fascinating anyway. Wonder whatever happened with all that.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#3I wonder what the functional difference is between rat brain cells and human brain cells.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#4Though the "brain" can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said.
Because flying a jet isn't all that impressive!?
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#5I wonder what the functional difference is between rat brain cells and human brain cells.
The cells are essentially identical.
This is a fundamental question when doing rat studies, you would like the regions of the brain your are affecting in the rat to be similar to the regions you would find in a human brain.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/genetics/ne...
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#6Though the "brain" can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said. Because flying a jet isn't all that impressive!?
That was exactly what I was thinking.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#7I just realized this was from 2004. Ah well, fascinating anyway. Wonder whatever happened with all that.
Well, you've heard about those "unmanned" drones...
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#8I just realized this was from 2004. Ah well, fascinating anyway. Wonder whatever happened with all that.
Well, there was a biohacking group in Los Angeles doing neural tissue cultures to replicate similar work.
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/fbi-diybio-2011/2011-07-13...
Regarding the other comment that was asking about how flying a jet might be insufficiently advanced: basically it's just wired up to Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the neural outputs are hooked up to the essential inputs and controls of the simulator. Hooking up an actual tissue culture with an electrode array tends to be more difficult (or at least more work) than wiring up keyboard bindings to a weight-summer network thing.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#9When this story broke it inspired a similar story about a dog brain in a dish playing Quake 3, which was later revealed to be a hoax: http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~dbailey/project1.html
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#10Though the "brain" can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said. Because flying a jet isn't all that impressive!?
On the scale of human brains, the type of flying described in the article is actually pretty easy. I've taught children as young as six years old to do it [in the pods shown at http://www.museumofflight.org/programs/aviation-learning-cen... ], and even younger kids show promise but didn't have the physical ability to use the control setup (the stick was too big, the chairs weren't tall enough, etc.) Honestly, walking is a considerably more elaborate task than flying a jet on a PC simulator.
I'm still impressed that an artificial brain was able to do it.