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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
 Posted - 08/14/2008 : 06:19:21
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This completely fascinates me and at the same time it gives me the creeps. The researchers claim the main difference between rat brains and human brains is neuron count, not sophistication. If that's so, they could build much larger brains with rat neurons. What if some type of intelligence emerges? Ratbot AI.... Freaky stuff. Any thoughts?
A 'Frankenrobot' with a biological brain
by Marlowe Hood
Wed Aug 13, 3:22 PM ET
PARIS (AFP) - Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.
Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.
Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.
"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.
Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.
Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.
Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.
This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.
Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.
The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.
From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections," said Warwick.
"Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.
But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.
"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.
To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.
To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions.
Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities -- several MEA "brains" that the scientists can dock into the robot.
"It's quite funny -- you get differences between the brains," said Warwick. "This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to."
Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of experiments.
But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be attributed to quantity not quality.
Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Humans have 100 billion.
"This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where we can look -- and control -- the basic features in the way that we want. In a human brain, you can't really do that," he said.
For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.
"The project gives us a unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons," he said. |
Link:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080813/sc_afp/sciencehealthneurobiologybrainrobots_080813192214
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-Chaloobi
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 07:17:45 [Permalink]
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Pretty cool!
As for neurons developing intelligence... I think it unlikely. The brain, as we are learning, relies on several cell types other than neurons for the function of things like memory.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 08:32:16 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
Pretty cool!
As for neurons developing intelligence... I think it unlikely. The brain, as we are learning, relies on several cell types other than neurons for the function of things like memory.
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Ratbot is apparently capable of learning so it must have some kind of memory ability. I wonder if they are only using neurons or if there's other cell types dumped into the matrix as well. As far as intelligence is concerned, Ratbot currently has 50 to 100k neurons, natural rats have about a million. If they expanded on the Ratbot matrix design so they were working with, lets say, ten million neurons, could it possibly become 'smarter' than a natural rat? I suspect it's not that simple... |
-Chaloobi
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9687 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 13:33:12 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by chaloobi
If they expanded on the Ratbot matrix design so they were working with, lets say, ten million neurons, could it possibly become 'smarter' than a natural rat? I suspect it's not that simple...
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The limited interface to the world will probably lower the development rate of intelligence...
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 13:53:49 [Permalink]
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It is interesting from the biology/silicon-technology interface aspect as well.
Having some meaningful way to echange data between a biological system and a microchip is fascinating.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 14:21:06 [Permalink]
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I went looking for data on number-of-neurons versus intelligence, but the search results were so clogged by white-supremist sites trumpeting whites' bigger brains that I gave up.
I did see, however, that one study correlates height with intelligence, so by standing the electrode array on its edge, Ratbot would get much smarter!
(Okay, seriously, height in humans is correlated with intelligence, probably because adult height correlates well with health during development.) |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 14:59:32 [Permalink]
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I think to recall that it is also, for a big part, a matter of architecture. Human has a humongous and disproportionate cortex when compared to a rat and that most of the actual 'thinking' happened there.
But I am not sure what the difference means in term of the neurons themselves.
I was reading Carl Sagan's 'Dragon of Eden' a few weeks ago on the subject. It is a bit out of date, but the man was a great writer! |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2008 : 19:07:58 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
Originally posted by chaloobi
If they expanded on the Ratbot matrix design so they were working with, lets say, ten million neurons, could it possibly become 'smarter' than a natural rat? I suspect it's not that simple...
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The limited interface to the world will probably lower the development rate of intelligence...
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Hell, making a more capable interface is probably the easy part of all this. 
The amazing part is how the completely separated neurons re-connected and spontaneously began responding to input. Who knows what a few million of those would do? Amazing. Might be hard to keep that many alive in the nutrient bath, climate control, etc... |
-Chaloobi
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First Cyborg?
