Slashdot Mirror
Flying By Brain
Garabito writes "Scientists at the University of Florida made a living 'brain' by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat's brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines to each other, creating a living neural network between them. The dish had a grid of 60 electrodes connected to a computer running a flight simulator. The scientists were able to train the 'brain' to control the plane in the simulator and to react to conditions of the plane. Are we getting closer to create an artificially made conscious being, or perhaps, a living computer?" AlphaJoe was one of several readers to add a link to Wired's article on the experiment.
the last thing i want is a rat flying my plane
The first thing I thought was: I want one. Wonder if it could learn to play GTA?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Igor, would you mind telling me whose brain I did put in?
Igor : And you won't be angry?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : I will NOT be angry.
Igor : Abby someone.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Abby someone. Abby who?
Igor : Abby Normal.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Abby Normal?
Igor : I'm almost sure that was the name.
a great new Itchy and Scratchy story?
Soon we will all be augmented by our extra brain bags! Organic computers in a purse that we either wear or have implanted in our abdomens. I can't wait for the beta test.
...our new Neuronal Overlords.
Chicken-egg problem, anyone? :)
:-/
Jesus Christ!
Am I the only one who thought of the dangerous consequences of this?!
Wait and watch, they're just about to embark on the creation of Pinky and the Brain
Pinky: What are we going to do tonight, Brain?
Brain: Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try and find myself a Brain.
I for one welcome our new plane-flying rat-brain overlords...
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
As a recent graduate of the University of Florida, I have one question to ask of these researchers: How many days do we have to wait until they have a prototype that can function as the football team's head coach? It can't be too hard to do better than Coach Zook.
(in drone-like monotone)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things.
As an airline pilot for American, its nice to see my job being outsourced by rats in the future.
they outsource my programming job to a petri dish...
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Do you have to think in Russian?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of 256 disembodied rat brains? (My first "traditional" slashdot joke.)
In other news,[1] rats have made clumps of neurons from scientists' brains behave in a crude sort of stimulus-response behaviour by connecting the neurons to a simulation of a news for nerds site.
[1]Or should that be 'In Soviet Russia...'?
Making them pilot a flying aircraft is one thing, but you'll never get them to helm a sinking ship.
Propably, but most of them don't read slashdot (or similar news sources), meaning that this kind of stuff doesn't usually reach them. Ignorance is bliss.
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
Yeah, it's great they have rat brains flying airplanes, but when do I get my shark with a frickin' laser?
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Adds a whole new dimension to the commercial, doesn't it?
This is your brain...
EricThis is your brain on drugs...
This is your brain on drugs flying a plane without you...
Why Vioxx is Prozac for lawyers
This is your captain, Rat Brain 4023, integrated neural network and my first officer, Rat Brain 4024. We'll be flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet and are expecting a nice smooth ride-- HOLY SHIT CHEESE!!! LOOK OVER THERE IT'S CHEESE!!! Ooop, sorry about that, false alarm. We're expecting nice weather in HEY THERE"s A F*ING CAT IN THE CARGO HOLD!!! Eject! Eject! Eject!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I fly for Eagle. As soon as the rat brains merge with the AA pilot group, they'll start flowing back to Eagle... to the left seat, of course.
(non-airline people, don't even try to understand that)
Frankly a collection of neurons just isn't powerful enough to "learn" how to fly a plane.
I will mention that to the pilot next time I get on an airplane.
Brings new meaning to the phrase "Pig Headed"
:(
yeah, that was a bad joke
... and something is REALLY bugging me about it.
How do you motivate a slice of rat brain to fly a plane? Does it feal pain when it crashes? Get nutrients when it flys far? What?
All too soon we will see little USB plug ins with these things to help the rail-gun spawn-campers aim fast in UT2024; Ultimate.
[FuZZy1] Punched a hole in 3L1T3's cranium
[3L1T3>] NOOB!
[3L1T3]; Rat-bot camper!
[FuZZy1]; LOL!1 That why tehy call me Fuzzy1
Rat brains flew a plane for the National Guard to get out of the Vietnam War.
Finally, we know how John Travolta learned how to fly his 747.
Or to say "Mission Accomplished!"
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Rats are ugly and disgusting and already have claws and teeth and biological weapons capability...now we give them Sidewinders, air-to-ground missles and 20 MM cannon. That's disturbing.
I'm immediately going to deploy a network of cat-neuron controlled anti-aircraft missle batteries.
damned rats.
They tried brain cells from different individuals. Here is the result:
Osama's cells: Plane kept crashing into buildings.
PHB cells: Plane kept flying in circles until it ran out of gas.
Bill Gates cells: Plane kept locking up.
SCO lawyer cells: Plane kept crashing, but blaming other planes.
RMS cells: Plane wanted to call itself "GNU Plane".
G.W. Bush cells: Plane kept crashing into Saddam Hussein no matter what, even if Osama was placed right next to Saddam.
John Kerry cells: Plane would fly to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left....
Slashdot reader cells: Plane would try to fly without first reading the flying manual.
Steve Jobs cells: Plane transformed itself into a slick, modern, translucent jet, but priced itself too high.
Mike Melvill cells: Plane kept going up and up until we lost track of it.
Emacs coder cells: Plane became a boat, a car, a house, a lawn mower, and a finger-nail clipper.
Table-ized A.I.
Nearly 200 responses and nobody has asked if it runs Linux.
The treatment is still in its infancy. It has helped with the Parkinson's disease, but the side effects have been a problem. Patients are overcome with the desire to wallow in their own feces.
For a moment there, I thought you were going to say,
~Idarubicin
"This has limitless scientific possibilities, which means one thing: We must keep Christians from finding out about it." -- The Onion
imagine a world where your brain is worth more outside your body
Considering the typical body of the average Slashdotter, I'd say that's probably already true.
I believe the Australians have already have run simulations of heavily armed rebel kangaroos in the outback.
About kangaroos and bazookas.
It seems that an american company, which shall remain nameless because some friends of mine were working there at the time, was trying to sell a battlefield simulation program to the Australian military. The intent was to integrate it with some flight-simulators so that the Aussie pilots could have a realistic battlefield with simulations of some of the semi-random events that surround and confuse real battles to fly through.
In order to try to put on a more effective sales presentation, the orders came down to customize it -- which meant building some distinctly australian things into the system in order to impress upon the militarish folk reviewing the system that (A) the system could be quickly and easily reconfigured or altered, and (B), the company was *REALLY* serious about making this sale.
So, Australian fauna was coded in -- in particular, kangaroos. The 'roos represented a real concern for possibly confusing pilots, because they have an upright posture, they're about man-sized, and they move *fast*. If you're not paying attention, or if you're looking mainly at IR traces in a night-fight, it could be pretty easy to confuse them with soldiers.
The shop used Object-Oriented programming - a technique in which each 'object type' is a subtype of some more fundamental type. This saves work because you can 'inherit' behaviors and constraints from the more fundamental type, and write new code only for the stuff that's actually different. In the case of the kangaroos, they 'inherited' from ground troopers (the base type for most of the non-aircraft in the simulation), and put in different data for returning an image, to make them look like kangaroos. They put in different parameters for movement, to make them faster than humans (a lot faster). They used the "not under orders/cut off from c-cubed-i" methods for troopers as the primary methods for the 'roos, to simulate that they didn't have objectives or strategies, and they set their morale to 'low' because mobs of kangaroos don't hang together or fight panic the way platoons of human soldiers do.
They got orders to include kangaroos about forty-eight hours before the scheduled demo, and did it in one night. They figured they were all set.
So, cut past the sales presentation and into the demo. Some pretty high-up officer from the Aussie air force is seated in the flight simulator, flying over this simulated battlefield in his simulated aircraft, and admiring all the simulated details.
And he spots a mob of kangaroos.
So, just to see how they'll react, he buzzes the 'roos. They scatter, of course, bounding away at a realistic kangaroo top-speed in a dozen different directions. The officer laughs, turns his airplane around to get a good look at how that's working, and then gets a nasty surprise. It seems that some of the kangaroos had regrouped, ducked around a nearby ridge and set up an ambush for him using surface-to-air missiles. He didn't see them, so around the ridge he went looking for them - and then he gets a shriek on his missile-detecting radar and the next second his simulated plane turns into a great big simulated fireball.
Yup.... the guys never quite managed to override that 'response to attack' method. Just forgot, I guess. And didn't see it in testing because they never actually *buzzed* the mob of 'roos and then got back into missile range.
The unexpected thing? The officer was delighted. He'd been looking for a way to get his pilots trained to leave the damn mobs of kangaroos alone. He forbade the americans to fix the 'error'. And the Australians actually bought that system, complete with bazooka-packing kangaroos.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
... Humans self organize and process signals in completely unconscious structures with no sense of pleasure. Humans like the hair dresser, plumber, or IT professional for instance. Self organisation and signal processing is what humans do. We've known for some time that certain types of electrical stimulation (cattle prods) can strengthen a connection where as others (free booze) can weaken a connection. But how this turns into cities and countries, we don't have a clue.
Tired of SQL? Try a true relational database:
"Ladies and gentlemen we will be ready for takeoff as soon as the copilot scrapes out Captain back into his dish" Explains why my flight in the other day was rougher than usual.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.
It's just such a great hook.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The egg came first. Why? Well, everything either tastes like chicken or is made from soy. Chicken isn't made from soy, so it can't possibly be a derivative of it. Likewise, soy doesn't taste like chicken.
The egg came first, it hatched out a soybean and a chicken. The soybean evolved into veggie burgers, dirt, and Chevy Avalanches. The chicken eventually evolved into numerous animals, possibly including humans.
Next, they'll hook it up to a Midi board and teach it to sing Puttin' On the Ritz.
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
then we would have a real human brain of sorts with out al the hormonal control systems
And how exactly am I supposed to overclock my brain computer without hormones? Am I supposed to sprinkle selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors over the petri dish? Great. Chances are, my computer would become suicidal.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Well it's not like there's a shortage of lemmings.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
sorry, I think that the Rooster came first. Else the egg would have been useless...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
First post!
...
... ...
Opppsss, not
Couple more tries and I will beat those humans
If I only had more than 25000 neurons
Dude you almost made me choke my chicken.
Like what I said? You might like my music
... is a little voice going:
"Help, please kill me..."
In other news, terrorists have set up cheese factories to produce Weapons of Mouse Destruction.