Use of rat brain cells as a processor

Translate This Thread From English to

Threaded View
MR Robot's Avatar (by Gravatar)MR Robot posted on
January 30, 2006, 5:51 pm
rate this thread
           For a while now I have been wondering what everyone else
thought of this. A little less than a year ago I believe, an article
appeared that described how a scientist took rat braincells and
cultured them in a petri dish with nutrients provided every day. He had
electrons hooked up to register the pulses of the neurons, and had
trained the brain to control a flight simulator.
           Regardless of technalities such as computer size, ethics,
and cost, how does everyone think that this would work in a robot
theoritically. I have no plans of doing it myself. For a long time,
machines have lagged in intelegence and their ablility to be flexible
in how they think. If they get damaged they are done for, and cannot
recover on their own. They do not have the ability to be  concious,
feel emotion, or learn(except under controlled enviroments). Please
tell me what you think of the idea as compared to so called
"intelegent" rigid computer programing AI


Other Related Threads
Padu's Avatar (by Gravatar)Padu posted on
January 30, 2006, 6:35 pm
Permalink

Re: Use of rat brain cells as a processor

MR Robot wrote

From my experience with AI, I can tell that although there are lots of
things in the field that are inspired on human intelligency and biological
processes, for me they are still nothing more than algorithms processing
information serially. Comparing with the absurd parallel capability of the
brain, even if you have a super cluster of computers working in parallel, it
is still serial.
I'm not saying that we compute faster than computers, and in most technical
and specific areas, we lose to the computer by a great margin. But we still
can't do horizontal processing with the computer (give the machine what we
call common sense).
There are lots of implications (including social) when the machine starts
behaving like humans. For example, we have compassion for creatures as they
are more intelligent, we don't even think twice when killing an insect, but
we frown (at least some of us) upon killing apes, dolphins, dogs and every
animal that demonstrates some degree of behavior.
I believe that if research continues, silicon-neuron integration will
continue, and there are obvious advantages from this type of research. I
remember reading some paper on integrating a CCD camera directly to the
optical nerve for blind people, and in my university (as well as in lots of
other universities) they are researching integrating a robotic arm to an
amputee's arm nerves. There is still a long road ahead for neural research,
but that road is very promising.

Padu



Site Timeline