Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 208 posts

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#91

Post by andbberger »

mjburgess wrote: post #3

It 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…

it's a tool in the toolbox. useful for mapping things out when doing functional experiments

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#92

Post by andbberger »

Jun8 wrote: post #80

My (maybe very ignorant) question is: can this connectome be used to “run” simulations of a virtual fruit fly, a la MMAcevedo?

no. turaga and co have some work where they constrain model network topologies with the connectome and train on visual data. this is imo a very silly line of research and they come to some very wrong conclusions about what neurons do what with it. but that's the closest to what you're asking for

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#96

Post by tomrod »

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #85

A big reason for my imminent-AGI Skepticism is the fact that our understanding of the currently existing, Biological intelligence is so, so shallow. We're here at "Systems level sketch of a fruit fly brain". It's incredible work! But as other comments detail, there is far more to the function of a fly brain than this "map". It's quite a long way from "Deep understanding of a Human Brain, to the point where we can beg…

I think we've already done this with a certain flatworm.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#97

Post by andbberger »

_giorgio_ wrote: post #47

Is this correct? It this like knowing only this: which neuron is connected to which neuron But you don't know: the values of the weights (the value of the neuron, or the parameters) the activation functions what circuit do neurons implement (fully connected? CNN?)

> which neuron is connected to which neuron

yes. and you can get VERY roughly connection strengths by synapse count but that's as far as you can go

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#98

Post by falcor84 »

criddell wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is useful. It is like getting a static map of the country's roads with no cars on it. You can not make it come alive with cars (activity), but you can infer where people need to drive but you don't know when and why they drive or what they are doing, but it is a major clue.

> It is like getting a static map of the country's roads with no cars on it. I was thinking it was more like giving somebody iPhone schematics and die shots of all the chips and then asking them to figure out how Portrait Mode works in the Camera app.

The difference is that in the brain there's no real separation between hardware and software, so I'm your analogy, we also have the equivalent of the source code, but just maybe not the environment configuration needed to get it to run (nor would we at this stage have sufficient compute to fully run it).

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #85

A big reason for my imminent-AGI Skepticism is the fact that our understanding of the currently existing, Biological intelligence is so, so shallow. We're here at "Systems level sketch of a fruit fly brain". It's incredible work! But as other comments detail, there is far more to the function of a fly brain than this "map". It's quite a long way from "Deep understanding of a Human Brain, to the point where we can beg…

[deleted]

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#100

Post by Retric »

snorin wrote: post #87
samatman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of, but mostly not. The critical distinction is that, given better data (the instruction set, the source code or binary of the OS and camera app), the schematics and die shots aren't necessary or even useful. It's unlikely that brains have an abstraction layer like that, so work like this is a necessary precondition to understanding the rest of how it works. That actual understanding may be elusive for quite som…

Why exactly would it be unlikely?

It would be really inefficient and neurons inherently provide a great deal of flexibility. Larger animals might use this kind of thing, but insects don’t have that many neurons to work with.

Luckily this is science so we can actually find out.

Post reply on HN