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Thanks for reminding us of openworm. The fact that scientists are still working on simulating an animal with barely a thousand cells surely relativizes claims

Thanks for reminding us of openworm. The fact that scientists are still working on simulating an animal with barely a thousand cells surely relativizes claims about simulating a mammalian brain, let alone a human one. Frankly, it's even kind of discouraging.

jacquesm 9y ago
It's one of the reasons I totally do not believe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project What I do believe is that once openworm achieves its goals that progress might become very rapid indeed.
Houshalter 9y ago
Meh, evolution is known to write utterly incomprehensible spaghetti code. It's really not surprising that reverse engineering it is so hard. Write a very simple genetic algorithm to evolve artificial neural networks or computer code. Often it can solve simple tasks in creative ways. But trying to understand the output is usually a nightmare. It usually comes up with ridiculously convoluted and insane ways of doing things. E.g; https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ >The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type. Now imagine a system many times larger and more sophisticated than that, that evolution has been hacking on for hundreds of millions of years. Doesn't mean we aren't close to human level AI though. We didn't completely reverse engineer birds before building airplanes, or horses before building cars.

jacquesm 9y ago

It's one of the reasons I totally do not believe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project What I do believe is that once openworm achieves its goals that progress might become very rapid indeed.

Houshalter 9y ago

Meh, evolution is known to write utterly incomprehensible spaghetti code. It's really not surprising that reverse engineering it is so hard. Write a very simple genetic algorithm to evolve artificial neural networks or computer code. Often it can solve simple tasks in creative ways. But trying to understand the output is usually a nightmare. It usually comes up with ridiculously convoluted and insane ways of doing things. E.g; https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ >The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type. Now imagine a system many times larger and more sophisticated than that, that evolution has been hacking on for hundreds of millions of years. Doesn't mean we aren't close to human level AI though. We didn't completely reverse engineer birds before building airplanes, or horses before building cars.