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In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells has learned to play Pong
- nawgz 3y agoWish I could read this whole paper. DishBrain sounds absolutely horrifying.
- nsxwolf 3y agoWe should stop doing things like this.
- sharkjacobs 3y agoStop experimenting on in vitro biological systems of cultured brain cells? Why?
- ALittleLight 3y agoYes, what possible moral problems could there be from using the one substance in the universe that we know produces sentience to build machines to play Pong?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoA lawsuit by Nolan Bushnell, with the settlement to be paid in quarters.
- nsxwolf 3y agoBecause eventually you have Blade Runner.
- Idiot_in_Vain 3y agoThat's what she said :)
- w4ffl35 3y agoWhy?
- idiotsecant 3y agosaid every luddite for the last 10 thousand years.
- ok_dad 3y agoI don't think the Luddite philosophy applies in this case, I think OP may have been speaking about the morality or ethics of growing a brain in a dish? Luddism is more about when the capitalist class steals worker productivity gains for themselves, and is a pretty valid philosophy for today, when the capitalists are trying to replace thinking humans wholesale with computer AI.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoHow many brain cells do you string together before the DishBrain gets some semblance of sentience? How many before it becomes conscious? We don’t know, of course. Perhaps consciousness isn’t possible without a live body. Or perhaps it takes just a few hundred thousand neurons. In the meantime, you run the risk of torturing a potentially conscious entity for…what gain exactly?
- canjobear 3y agoIt’s just repeating statistical patterns in its input-output mapping.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoTIL what a luddite is: apparently they started in 1811 and were named after Ned Ludd, a textile worker in England. So what was the characteristic called in 1810?
- pessimizer 3y agoAccording to who you're replying to, they're actually 10,000 years old, and complain about scientific research, rather than about being pushed out of their textile jobs by machinery.
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- frisco 3y agoInterestingly, this is not a new result; people have been doing stuff like this since at least the 90s, most notably Steve Potter at GA Tech and Tom DeMarse in Florida.[1][2] (I built a shitty counterstrike aimbot using a cultured neural network in college based on their papers.) There was a lot of coverage back in 2004 when DeMarse hooked it up to a flight simulator and claimed it was flying an F-22 [3] (lol, but I don't blame him too much...) The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be "inputs" and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate both ends the cells wire together more or less according to Hebb's rule[4] and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings. On the other hand, these cultures have essentially no advantage over digital computers and modern machine learning models. Once you get through the initial cool factor, you realize it's a pain to keep the culture perfectly sterile, fed, supplied with the right gases, among many other practical problems, for a model which is just much less powerful, introspectable, and debuggable than is possible on digital computers. [1] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/files/2010/10/DeMarseAutonRobots2001.pdf https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/fi... [2] https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/ https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/ [3] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/ https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
- sroussey 3y agoWe have lots of these cultures around for drug testing. I wonder if the “brain” playing pong affects the tests in any way.
- api 3y agoWhat I always wonder about with these systems is how feedback was delivered to the cultured neurons. How do we tell them they're doing things correctly? Or is this some form of unsupervised learning with them?
- seydor 3y agothe original paper is available https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 They used a specific region of the electrode array to deliver the "reward" signal which was a regular predictable pulse pattern . An error was represented with unpredictable activity
- 1-6 3y agoIt's fascinating how brain cells outside of its host can do simple tricks like play pong. Perhaps these scientists need a new marketing department because DishBrain isn't quite appetizing.
- harveywi 3y agoDishBrain's elevator pitch: Neural networks meet fava beans and a nice Chianti.
- juliusgeo 3y agoMaybe they could rebrand to "Brainlent Green".
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoYeah, this is ethically-sourced meat, right? You could have a whole pipeline that trains neural nets to farm gold, and then slaughter it for a steady supply of cabeza to every taco truck in these United States. https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
- juliusgeo 3y agoI would dare to say that's not even an outrageous proposal, more of a modest.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThis month I shall begin to identify as prepackaged cultured meat with a fully-functional neural net. (It's OK, I'm an expert at Pong.)
- bitwize 3y agoThat's liver. When it comes to brains, canonically Hannibal is fond of eating them straight out of the skull, with the owner still alive and conscious.
- api 3y agoIn Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy (a series of sci-fi novels) there are large cultured masses of neurons used as a form of AI and nicknamed "head cheese."
- kanzure 3y agoThe whole field of biological intelligence needs a ChatGPT moment. There's at least four or five different companies running around trying to do this with biological neurons, but unfortunately pong just isn't a spectacular demo.
- bilsbie 3y agoDo they use gradient descent? Otherwise how do they train?
- m3kw9 3y agoWe need this aws service, maybe call it “Real Brain”. You train it, except you cannot untrain it
- chimineycricket 3y agoBut you can click "Delete".
- RobotToaster 3y agoCan it play doom?
- colordrops 3y agoAre these human brain cells? And how many do you have to grow before it becomes an ethics issue, i.e until it grows into a proper brain that has subjective experience?
- bhaney 3y ago> Are these human brain cells? A goal of the paper is to produce a system that can be used by researchers to experiment on neurons from different sources. It mentions its use of a few different cell lines, from mice and humans both, so at least some DishBrain runs used human cells. The human cells were from cell line ATCC PCS-201-010, which are stem cells derived from the dermal cells of a newborn baby's foreskin. The authors coaxed those stem cells to differentiate into neurons. > how many do you have to grow before it becomes an ethics issue The paper says they used methods to "achieve a dorsal forebrain patterning" and plated 10^6 cells on each electrode array used for testing (about 5x the brain cells of a mosquito, or a tenth of the cells in a mouse brain). Note that I have no idea if all million of those cells survived until the experiments were carried out, or if they were all actually used in each "brain" (maybe they were segmented out?) I think the ethical issues are going to depend largely on how much the structure of the neurons affects awareness. A pile of 10 million random mouse neurons on a plate probably doesn't have anywhere near the same value of experience that a 10 million neuron actual mouse brain has. But I'd say if you're okay with experimenting on mice, 1 million neurons in a petri dish is very ethically safe in comparison. Agreed that we're starting to get to the point where it's more questionable though.
- quesera 3y ago> A pile of 10 million random mouse neurons on a plate probably doesn't have anywhere near the same value of experience that a 10 million neuron actual mouse brain has. In particular, I question the significance of neural activity in the absence of sensory organs. One might argue that at some critical mass / neuron count, presumably well above mouse-level, there is the potential of sentience. OK, but what is sentience in the absence of sensation? I don't know the answer to that question! But I'm fairly confident I don't place its well-being high on the ethical totem pole.
- bhaney 3y agoDoes it play pong well? Random noise can "play" pong, in that it can be translated into commands to erratically move the player's paddle and occasionally hit the ball by chance. Can anyone with access to the full paper report on how impressively the DishBrain plays? I'm not necessarily expecting human-level skill, but at least something to indicate that it's responding appropriately to the game's state and working towards winning, rather than just wobbling the paddle around randomly.
- comfypotato 3y agoIt learns over time and shows statistically significant improvement. It’s still pretty terrible, but to answer your question: yes it’s not random.
- seydor 3y agoThe paper is open access https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 It's not "playing well". The experiment is set up so as to reinforce (through LTP) its dynamics when it performs correct rather than wrong. This ends up "wobbling the paddle around" with a statistically significant better performance than untrained . This is not a brain that knows what it's doing, but a few thousand neurons apparently able to undergo plasticity
- bhaney 3y ago> a few thousand neurons Does that come from somewhere in the paper? I'm seeing "10^6 cells plated onto each MEA" and trying to determine if that's the size of each "DishBrain" or if the number is pared down before actual tests are carried out.
- seydor 3y agoI see in the paper that they used 800K and 1M culture neurons . The device in question however (MaxOne) has a size of 8 square mm. I m not sure if the cells they plated can actually be recorded/ stimulated as the device is rather high resolution with 26400 densely packed electodes that can record from multiple spots of a single neuron. In typical recordings from these there are much fewer neurons in culture
- bhaney 3y agoHere's a short video included in the full paper of the system playing pong (plus a visualization of measured neural activity) https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001/attachment/db2f7e55-0486-47dc-a440-86d54864fbc1/mmc3.mp4 https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001/attach...
- sheepscreek 3y agoI’m surprised no one has touted power consumption as a huge benefit of using these neural networks. GPU supercomputers no longer necessary. Just a BrainStation or two.
- xvilka 3y agoOne advantage of this that you could theoretically build a few cubic meters of brain tissue that would be potentially far smarter than human.
- stan_kirdey 3y agothe beginning of Krang I really hope there are tiny turtles learning martial arts right this time
- kevlened 3y agoIf you're interested in exploring direct neuron + computer integration, Justin Atkin from The Thought Emporium is attempting to grow neurons on an electrode array. Here are two episodes that cover his work: Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g Connecting Neurons to a Computer: The New Plan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1C0qpqpAWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1C0qpqpAWc
- ftxbro 3y agothis is amazing. our brain sizes will no longer be limited to the size of our skulls. we can have giant pulsating brain organoid the size of a meat locker with oxygenated hemosynth, glucose, antibiotic, and cooling tubes going in and out of the room. the room is the size of a meat locker but it's non-ferrous. It's actually housed inside of a MegaTesla fMRI that monitors the organoid and this is in fact how the output is read from it. input to the organoid is visual. the organoid's surface is spotted with light-sensitive patches of proto-retinal tissue of varying degrees of organization and development.