Online 'Sand Mouse' Tests Neurobiologists

The Metahacker writes: " A Princeton professor and his former student have created a 'mouse' (really, a neural net) that recognizes the word 'one' as spoken by a variety of speakers. The interesting part? They're challenging the neurobiology community to discover the mechanism it uses, using only the tools available to analyze live patients - observation and experimentation. You can upload your own sound files to test the mouse, and view experiments other scientists have performed. Cash prizes will be awarded to those who explain the mouse's behavior or can train the same number of neurons to perform a new task. You can read the New York Times article about it (free registration), or go directly to the site."

Comments

We've had that for ages

[Anne Marie]

A neurologically simple brain for determining whether the number "1" has been achieved? Sounds like a first-poster if I ever heard of one.

My hypothesis: the mouse checks the cid# like the rest of us.

Philosophically important

[SIGFPE]

I think this experiment could be very important for neurobiological research and maybe other typs of research. There are many fields of science where it is possible to go on forever publishing research without any checks. Obvious areas where this goes on are fields like so-called postmodern literary criticism. But it happens in the sciences too. In behavioural evolutionary biology you can make up just-so stories in paper after paper safe in the knowledge that nobody else can rerun evolution for you and demonstrate that you are wrong. In psychology you can repeatedly perform experiments measuring correlation between this variable and that. By chance one in 20 results are 95% significant and you publish those results as if they are something other than noise. Hopfield's experiment is going to be a sanity check against this kind of work - a kind of experimental control. Here's a situation where somebody does know the answer and work can be checked. A neural net involving only a few hundred neurons. If researchers are unable to reverse engineer this then should they really have jobs supposedly reverse engineering animal or even human brains? We need to see a few more tests like this in academia. Beyond a certain point - after you've taken your last exam - academics are no longer accountable to anyone. Sure - you get peer reviewed. But what happens when you and your peers all belong to a clique that have a vested interest in promulgating a particular scientific dogma? This experiment is a wonderful way to ensure that researchers still are being tested.
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