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Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps

by pjs_ 5mo ago

Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the mysterious little blob of neurons -- they aren't just wired straight into WASD. There is a conventional convnet-based encoder, running on a GPU, in the critical path. The README tries to argue that the "neurons are doing the learning" but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Are the neurons learning to play doom, or are they learning to inject ever so slightly more effective noise into the critical path? Would this work just as well if we replaced the neurons with some other non-markovian sludge? The authors do ablation experiments to try to get to the bottom of this but I can't really tell how compelling the results are (due to my own ignorance/stupidity of course)

croemer 5mo ago
Someone should try to replace the neurons with urand and see if the chip can still play Doom, in the spirit of the qday prize winner.
- amelius 5mo ago
  Reminds me of the ship of theseus philosophical experiment where they replace neurons by logic gates one by one and ask when exactly consciousness stops existing.
  - deadfoxygrandpa 5mo ago
    i dont think its clear that logic gates can ever replace neurons in the first place
rf15 5mo ago
> but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Yeah it feels like they constructed the conclusion and worked backwards from there. I'm not seeing how their claim has much merit.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Retr0id 5mo ago
This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897647, where a quantum computing demo worked equally well if you replaced the QC with an entropy source.
noosphr 5mo ago
All opinions are my own: The whole point of the CNNs is to act like a auto encoder for input and an auto decoder for output. The only reason why this is done in the first place is because the number of electrodes in the dish is pitiful and has no chance of describing something as complex as Doom. They are there to create a latent space that can be fed through 60 odd electrodes and decode the neuron latent space into pressing buttons. The pong version of the game was the proof of concept that neurons can learn without a latent space intermediate in either direction. Both the world state and neuronal control were raw signals: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228614/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228614/ What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals as the computational substrate. Use the visual cortex of one as the input, send the neural spikes to a second animals frontal lobe for computation and finally send those signals to a third animals motor cortex to physically press buttons. It's a shame we never raised enough because it wouldn't have cost more than $15m to build the hardware and do the biological proof of concept.
- batch12 5mo ago
  > using live animals as the computational substrate. Use the visual cortex of one as the input, send the neural spikes to a second animals frontal lobe for computation and finally send those signals to a third animals motor cortex to physically press buttons. That sounds terrifying.
  - altmanaltman 5mo ago
    It does but most of what we do to animals is terrifying. I could see why getting funding for this idea might not have been that easy though "I want to mind control three animals to play Doom" is certainly a pitch
    - 4gotunameagain 5mo ago
      That is the fallacy of relative privation. The fact that most of what we do to animals is terrifying should be the motivating factor to NOT do more of it, such as the atrocity described above.

by pjs_ 5mo ago

croemer 5mo ago

Someone should try to replace the neurons with urand and see if the chip can still play Doom, in the spirit of the qday prize winner.

amelius 5mo ago
Reminds me of the ship of theseus philosophical experiment where they replace neurons by logic gates one by one and ask when exactly consciousness stops existing.
- deadfoxygrandpa 5mo ago
  i dont think its clear that logic gates can ever replace neurons in the first place

rf15 5mo ago

> but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Yeah it feels like they constructed the conclusion and worked backwards from there. I'm not seeing how their claim has much merit.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Retr0id 5mo ago

This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897647, where a quantum computing demo worked equally well if you replaced the QC with an entropy source.

noosphr 5mo ago

All opinions are my own: The whole point of the CNNs is to act like a auto encoder for input and an auto decoder for output. The only reason why this is done in the first place is because the number of electrodes in the dish is pitiful and has no chance of describing something as complex as Doom. They are there to create a latent space that can be fed through 60 odd electrodes and decode the neuron latent space into pressing buttons. The pong version of the game was the proof of concept that neurons can learn without a latent space intermediate in either direction. Both the world state and neuronal control were raw signals: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228614/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228614/ What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals as the computational substrate. Use the visual cortex of one as the input, send the neural spikes to a second animals frontal lobe for computation and finally send those signals to a third animals motor cortex to physically press buttons. It's a shame we never raised enough because it wouldn't have cost more than $15m to build the hardware and do the biological proof of concept.

batch12 5mo ago
> using live animals as the computational substrate. Use the visual cortex of one as the input, send the neural spikes to a second animals frontal lobe for computation and finally send those signals to a third animals motor cortex to physically press buttons. That sounds terrifying.
- altmanaltman 5mo ago
  It does but most of what we do to animals is terrifying. I could see why getting funding for this idea might not have been that easy though "I want to mind control three animals to play Doom" is certainly a pitch
  - 4gotunameagain 5mo ago
    That is the fallacy of relative privation. The fact that most of what we do to animals is terrifying should be the motivating factor to NOT do more of it, such as the atrocity described above.