[HN Gopher] In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells h... ___________________________________________________________________ In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells has learned to play Pong Author : areoform Score : 62 points Date : 2023-06-02 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nature.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com) | nawgz wrote: | Wish I could read this whole paper. DishBrain sounds absolutely | horrifying. | nsxwolf wrote: | We should stop doing things like this. | Idiot_in_Vain wrote: | That's what she said :) | w4ffl35 wrote: | Why? | idiotsecant wrote: | said every luddite for the last 10 thousand years. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | How many brain cells do you string together before the | DishBrain gets some semblance of sentience? How many before | it becomes conscious? | | We don't know, of course. Perhaps consciousness isn't | possible without a live body. Or perhaps it takes just a few | hundred thousand neurons. | | In the meantime, you run the risk of torturing a potentially | conscious entity for...what gain exactly? | ok_dad wrote: | I don't think the Luddite philosophy applies in this case, I | think OP may have been speaking about the morality or ethics | of growing a brain in a dish? Luddism is more about when the | capitalist class steals worker productivity gains for | themselves, and is a pretty valid philosophy for today, when | the capitalists are trying to replace thinking humans | wholesale with computer AI. | jjtheblunt wrote: | TIL what a luddite is: apparently they started in 1811 and | were named after Ned Ludd, a textile worker in England. So | what was the characteristic called in 1810? | pessimizer wrote: | According to who you're replying to, they're actually | 10,000 years old, and complain about scientific research, | rather than about being pushed out of their textile jobs by | machinery. | sharkjacobs wrote: | Stop experimenting on in vitro biological systems of cultured | brain cells? Why? | api wrote: | In Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy (a series of sci-fi novels) there | are large cultured masses of neurons used as a form of AI and | nicknamed "head cheese." | m3kw9 wrote: | We need this aws service, maybe call it "Real Brain". You train | it, except you cannot untrain it | frisco wrote: | Interestingly, this is not a new result; people have been doing | stuff like this since at least the 90s, most notably Steve Potter | at GA Tech and Tom DeMarse in Florida.[1][2] (I built a shitty | counterstrike aimbot using a cultured neural network in college | based on their papers.) | | There was a lot of coverage back in 2004 when DeMarse hooked it | up to a flight simulator and claimed it was flying an F-22 [3] | (lol, but I don't blame him too much...) | | The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode | array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be "inputs" | and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate both ends | the cells wire together more or less according to Hebb's rule[4] | and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings. | | On the other hand, these cultures have essentially no advantage | over digital computers and modern machine learning models. Once | you get through the initial cool factor, you realize it's a pain | to keep the culture perfectly sterile, fed, supplied with the | right gases, among many other practical problems, for a model | which is just much less powerful, introspectable, and debuggable | than is possible on digital computers. | | [1] https://bpb- | us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/fi... | | [2] https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/ | | [3] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/ | | [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory | sroussey wrote: | We have lots of these cultures around for drug testing. I | wonder if the "brain" playing pong affects the tests in any | way. | api wrote: | What I always wonder about with these systems is how feedback | was delivered to the cultured neurons. How do we tell them | they're doing things correctly? Or is this some form of | unsupervised learning with them? | seydor wrote: | the original paper is available | https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 | | They used a specific region of the electrode array to deliver | the "reward" signal which was a regular predictable pulse | pattern . An error was represented with unpredictable | activity | fnordpiglet wrote: | I was with you up to "once you get over the cool factor." It | seems impossible to get over how cool it is to have a minibrain | playing video games. Having one of those at home must really | impress the girls. | UniverseHacker wrote: | Moreover, if there are girls not impressed by this, you will | know, and have really dodged a bullet. | seydor wrote: | "played video games" is overstatement. There was a slight | increase in the performance with the particular setup that | they used. It was not as straightforward as it sounds. This | kind of science is still in its infancy | spaceman_2020 wrote: | "Meet my brother. He's adopted" | UniverseHacker wrote: | > The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode | array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be | "inputs" and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate | both ends the cells wire together more or less according to | Hebb's rule[4] and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings. | | This is fascinating, can you clarify it a bit? Do you | 'stimulate', e.g. apply electrical potential to both the inputs | and outputs to represent each instance of training data, | without any physical distinction between input and output at | that stage? And then if you apply the potential only the | inputs, you can then read predictions on the outputs? | 1-6 wrote: | It's fascinating how brain cells outside of its host can do | simple tricks like play pong. Perhaps these scientists need a new | marketing department because DishBrain isn't quite appetizing. | beebeepka wrote: | Maybe they can do more than play pong. Is "the host" something | more than machinery, a vehicle, to a big clump of brain cells? | Is there a soul? Or is it all an illusion | | I've tried cow brain twice and it was delicious. | harveywi wrote: | DishBrain's elevator pitch: Neural networks meet fava beans and | a nice Chianti. | juliusgeo wrote: | Maybe they could rebrand to "Brainlent Green". | RobotToaster wrote: | Can it play doom? | bilsbie wrote: | Do they use gradient descent? Otherwise how do they train? | kanzure wrote: | The whole field of biological intelligence needs a ChatGPT | moment. There's at least four or five different companies running | around trying to do this with biological neurons, but | unfortunately pong just isn't a spectacular demo. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-02 23:00 UTC)