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Scientists Create Logic Gates from Living Neurons
- jff 18y agoI just want to see, oh, an 8-bit full adder. Not all that many gates and it can do real work.
- lallysingh 18y agoI'd love a fully brain-implantable FPU. I'm even willing to start thinking in stack notation!
- davi 18y agoVery cool. Deeper info on project page: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/EMoses/projects/NeuralDevices/index.html http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/EMoses/projects/NeuralDevi... This shows an oscillator built of diodes. On to the Nature Physics article, now.
- Dilpil 18y agoPretty cool, but before anyone starts talking about the coming age of bio computation, keep in mind neurons are a horribly inefficient way of carrying out this kind of computation.
- likpok 18y agoThis might lead to a deeper understanding of how neural nets work (or an easier way of implementing them in the hardware, as it were). If we can design regular logic in neurons, we can (eventually?) do some of the fancy neural nets, and then we have the basis of an actually useful breakthrough. Cool stuff though.
- endtime 18y agoIf we can design regular logic in neurons, we can (eventually?) do some of the fancy neural nets Well, yes, if you can make logic gates out of neurons you could eventually implement a neural network with actual neurons, but it would be little more than a perverse pun. Unless I'm missing your point...?
- mattmcknight 18y agoI was thinking something similar, that you are taking a complex biological computation device that has over 1000 synapses, each carrying some complex quantity of information, and reducing it to a bit. This is an inefficient use of a neuron.
- amackera 18y agoYou are quite correct; however, I think one interesting corollary to this research is the interface between brain and computer. Though we still require a method by which to translate brain function into Boolean-esque logic, at least when we figure that out we'll have a method to input that data into a computer (however inefficient that method may be).
- dhughes 18y agoYes it does seem as if someone took some very complex transistors and used them as a knobs on an abacus. The recent discovery that it may be possible for a single neuron to store a memory makes it all the more likely ( http://www.livescience.com/health/090125-memory-cell.html http://www.livescience.com/health/090125-memory-cell.html )
- lallysingh 18y agoWhat's nice about this is that living cells can heal to an extent, which is more than we can say for silicon.
- glymor 18y agoAFAIK living cells doesn't heal they auto-destruct and are replaced by new cells.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThis requires one of those "yes and no" answers. Sometimes cells auto-destruct and are replaced by new cells. Other times, they heal. Both strategies can be useful, depending on the situation.
- dmoney 18y agoSo would the barrier to making things like adders, latches, etc. (in other words, everything you need to build a Von Neumann computer) be that they don't have a way to make NOT gates? Or would making NOT gates out what they have not be a big deal?
- barrkel 18y agoNow, if they said they made living neurons (or models thereof) out of logic gates, it might even be useful.