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A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator
- zeroexzeroone 14y agothe singularity is near...
- zeroexzeroone 14y agothe singularity is near...
- quux 14y agoHow did the brain know what situations were good or bad? Were there reward and pain electrodes or something?
- dhughes 14y agoI imagined blowing up the bad guys = cheese.
- ruedaminute 14y agoI just realized this was from 2004. Ah well, fascinating anyway. Wonder whatever happened with all that.
- sprobertson 14y agoWell, you've heard about those "unmanned" drones...
- kanzure 14y agoWell, there was a biohacking group in Los Angeles doing neural tissue cultures to replicate similar work. http://biohackers.la/ http://biohackers.la/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/fbi-diybio-2011/2011-07-13.txt 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.
- duaneb 14y agoI wonder what the functional difference is between rat brain cells and human brain cells.
- mercuryrising 14y agoThe 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/neurobiol.html http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/genetics/ne...
- famousactress 14y agoThough 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!?
- andrewmunsell 14y agoThat was exactly what I was thinking.
- lotharbot 14y agoOn 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-center-adult-programs 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.
- mikeash 14y agoControlling 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.
- bigiain 14y agoPeople 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-05.htm https://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_5_Kit_p/br-ardupilotmega-0...
- omegant 14y agoFlying straight and level is More or less the me dificulty of driving a pedal cart in your street (with an added dimension up and down). Old time jets were very tricky to flight due to their high inestability. But modern flybywire combat jets must be easy to fly( even if they are impossible to fly without computers due to their crazy inestability), because the hard part is outside in the combat theater. Also like in sea combat, the most important part is not being a skill beast (aerobatic champion), is more about knowing how to obtain the best positions, that gives you advantage against your enemies. Any way I don't see rat brains landing in a n aircraft carrier anytime soon!
- Zikes 14y agoWhen 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 http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~dbailey/project1.html
- sukuriant 14y agoAnd 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.
- sp332 14y agoIt's already aware of its surroundings, and can respond to its environment.
- sukuriant 14y agosentience then
- icebraining 14y agoAn instance of Nginx can also respond to its environment, but I wouldn't call it sentient.
- sukuriant 14y agoprecisely. So, then replace 'consciousness' with 'sentience' in my original proposition. I am not saying response to an environment is sentience; but, when using living brain tissue, there may be a chance that these computers will eventually display sentience.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoI 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.
- ktizo 14y agoKevin 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-brain-robot-grows-up 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ruedaminute 14y agoAh, good point! I bet this lady has one of those tubs of myelin: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025069/Joan-Ginther-Maths-professor-hits-multi-million-scratchcard-lottery-jackpot-4-times.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025069/Joan-Ginth...
- StavrosK 14y agoIt's the daily mail. The correlation of its stories with reality is exactly 0.
- ruedaminute 14y agoNah dude, this one did happen. Google 'Joan Ginther', it's been written about everywhere.
- ktizo 14y agoPerhaps they were trying to prove she cures cancer, and accidentally wrote something vaguely accurate instead.
- StavrosK 14y agoI know it's bad form to comment rather than just upvote, but I wanted you to know I'm still laughing with that remark.
- 14y ago
- mwhooker 14y agoI found this paper on the "semi-living artist" mentioned in the article fascinating. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2533587/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2533587/ Answered a lot of my questions about how the brain was cultured and stimulated.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoKind of creepy, reminds me of the Stanislaw Lem story about the mouse brain over ride in the long duration starship.
- peeters 14y agoWhenever 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.
- jakeonthemove 14y agoOf course not! You're just a brain plugged into a highly advanced organic mobile platform - you should feel good about it :-).
- cglee 14y agoThe "highly advanced" part remains yet to be seen.
- omarchowdhury 14y agoyeah, because YOU, are controlling every interaction of the trillion-trillion cells in your body
- Deestan 14y agoIt has far more mobility and longevity that any machine we're able to produce at the moment.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- purui 14y ago25k cells. Even if the brain is fully connected bidirectionally, it has at most 625M connections. Can it be simulated by software?
- jostmey 14y agoYeah, with about ten lines of code. The neurons are acting as a simple PID controller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller
- ftwinnovations 14y agoOdd, this is from 2004, so it's 8 years old, which is like a century in tech years. I'm surprised I have not heard of more advancements in this (creepy!) field.
- jostmey 14y agoThat because basic science research is a painstaking slow process. It is very rare to see a field of research just explode at an exponential pace like software development has.
- jostmey 14y agoOld news. Simple PID controller.
- jared314 14y agoI wonder what the minimum number of neurons is to successfully fly the plane.
- jjcm 14y agoHere's the paper: http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page13/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page13/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf It looks like they're using a combination of high and low frequency pulses as a reward/punishment mechanism, though I don't fully understand how that influences the decisions being made. Would love if someone could explain it in more detail.
- jostmey 14y agoIt is called Long Term Potentiation and is believed to be one of the ways information is stored in the brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
- jostmey 14y agoI actually meet DeMarse in Florida. I made it a point to try and speak with him about his "brain in a dish". He was clearly aggravated with me. He told me about all the other amazing things his lab was doing, and how "dumb" his "brain in a dish" actually was. It was obvious to me that he felt the attention his "brain in a dish" had received was unwarranted.
- sillysaurus 14y agoThank you for sharing this. The attention he received for it was absolutely unwarranted. Anyone who reads the paper and understands what was written would also understand that. Unfortunately, not many people take the time to do that. I've not heard of anyone else attempt it -- it took me several hours of intensive thought to finally figure out what he'd done. At the end of it I felt so disgusted that it was being presented as "rat brain flies plane" that over the years I've often been tempted to do a write-up chastising the author for advancing his scientific career by tricking people rather than discover something new or build something innovative. This story has been reposted to HN a few times over the years. My reaction to this particular repost was to feel intensely guilty that so many people were still being tricked by the same old snakeoil. Then I looked up what the author had done in the subsequent years, and it's a pleasant surprise: DeMarse has worked on some wonderfully interesting projects which are quite unique. I'm glad that I never tried to expose this "brain in a dish" as the lie that it is. Everyone deserves to make a mistake once in awhile, and his, I think, was merely to be flattered that reporters were interested in his work at all, which is quite a natural reaction. I'm sure he regrets that he wasn't as careful as he should've been with correcting the reporters' assumptions.
- jostmey 14y agoYeah, DeMarse is a real scientist (or engineer?). I speculate that he did what he did to raise money for his research. I think DARPA money started pouring in to fund his lab after that paper. I just wish more money flowed through the NSF/NIH instead :-)
- sillysaurus 14y ago
- aaronbrethorst 14y agoOh great, they invented a Cylon Raider. This'll end well.
- thenomad 14y agoIt's OK, They Have A Plan.
- gersh 14y agoHow do you grow the rat brain? How hard is it to keep the rat brain alive? How hard would it be to mass produce rat brain CPUs?
- jostmey 14y agoYou cut open the skull of the rat, pick out the ripest looking neurons, and place them on a block of cheese. Okay, here is what actually happens. Neurons don't usually differentiate. So instead, cancerous neuronal cells are commonly used (neuroblastoma cells). Basically, these neuronal cells have decided to divide rapidly. You simply place these cells in a serum of growth medium consisting of protein, sugars, and salts and watch them divide over the course of a few days. It would be nice to use stem cells instead or cancerous cells... but that is another thread entirely.
- MaysonL 14y agoRat brains? Paul Linebarger is rolling in his grave. [See "The Game of Rat and Dragon" if you don't get it.] http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Smith-C/Game-Rat-Dragon.html http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Smith-C/Game-Rat-Dragon.ht...
- vegasbrianc 14y agoBeginning to a Rat powered Skynet?
- rjzzleep 14y agogood idea, lets have animal brains into our skynet robots. they totally don't hate us for exterminating a species a week.
- orbitingpluto 14y agoPinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?" The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"