How did the brain know what situations were good or bad? Were there reward and pain electrodes or something?
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
#22Kevin Warwick has a more up to date version of this controlling a robot in his lab at Reading Uni - http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/rat-br... Presumably someone, somewhere has a bathtub of human neurons and is probably using them to try and predict the stock exchange.
Ah, good point! I bet this lady has one of those tubs of myelin: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025069/Joan-Ginth...
It's the daily mail. The correlation of its stories with reality is exactly 0.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#23Though 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!?
They've evolved a neural network (in this case, made of real neurons instead of computer simulation) which presumably emits certain signals when it does not detect the horizon in the correct position. It's impressive, but I don't think they were having it take off from an aircraft carrier and land at JFK.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#24Though 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!?
Controlling pitch and roll while at altitude is not actually very impressive, no. If you were writing code to do this, you'd probably just slap a PID controller on each axis, tune the coefficients, and be done. You might break 100 lines of code if you like being verbose.
People have quite significantly more sophisticated control that that running on dinky little 8 bit micro controllers, see Ardupilot at https://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_5_Kit_p/br-ardupilotmega-0...
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, good point! I bet this lady has one of those tubs of myelin: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025069/Joan-Ginth...
It's the daily mail. The correlation of its stories with reality is exactly 0.
Nah dude, this one did happen. Google 'Joan Ginther', it's been written about everywhere.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#26And oh the fun that the ethics questions will become if this takes root and if the brains somehow show a level of consciousness in the future.
It's already aware of its surroundings, and can respond to its environment.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#27Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#28And oh the fun that the ethics questions will become if this takes root and if the brains somehow show a level of consciousness in the future.
I saw this documentary yesterday (which had a VERY interesting sequence about those rat neurons flying planes, interviewing one of their "fathers" ^^). It is about the future, AI and transhumanism, called TechnoCalyps, which despite the title is actually rather good. It's on youtube, too.. so if you have 3 hours to spare.. it is sure to make you think about a whole range of subjects.
IMHO these things cannot be considered in isolation. We as society should really start talking about our progress and where we want to go, instead of a few people being into it, the rest feeling threatened. We can do better, and we surely have to the tools for it.
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#29Whenever I hear stuff like this, I feel an existential crisis looming. I'm about 99% sure that I'm not just a brain in a dish plugged into a simulator.
Of course not! You're just a brain plugged into a highly advanced organic mobile platform - you should feel good about it :-).
Re: A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
#30Whenever I hear stuff like this, I feel an existential crisis looming. I'm about 99% sure that I'm not just a brain in a dish plugged into a simulator.
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