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.
We designed neural networks to follow how brains work.
:)
Now we're using a brain to run a neural network.
Chicken-egg problem, anyone?
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.
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.
Does this freak the shit out of anyone else?
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.
How did the clump of neurons know what they were trying to accomplish? More precicely, why didn't they try to crash the plane? What sort of positive/negative feedback did they use? I understand that this works, and vaugely how it works, but i can't wrap my poor little brain around what sort of feedback they used!
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
(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."
Am I the only one disturbed by this stuff? I know it's only a rat, but...imagine a world where your brain (sliced and diced) is worth more outside your body than inside. For some reason this kind of reminds me of Larry Niven's classic "Patchwork Girl".
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
Bring a whole new meaning of a computer virus ...
Do you have to think in Russian?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
So, how is this thing reacting to good and bad?
Did they create a neural net that falls through a given search space to a local or global minimum, or what?
Is "good" a total lack of input, i.e. the plane is flying straight with no lateral or vertical drift, and is degree of input dependent on the amount of lateral motion, etc.?
As I type this, it makes sense that this might be so, but I wonder why the network created a negative feedback system, and not a positive feedback system.
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger
I wonder if human neurons would be more effective? Or are all neurons created equal, and only the structure of a brain makes it more or less intelligent? Could we grow rat neurons into a human brain? Maybe we could customize brains for certain abilities, by growing them along certain structures. I don't have alot of personal knowledge here, so i'm just putting out some questions that this brought up for me.
Making them pilot a flying aircraft is one thing, but you'll never get them to helm a sinking ship.
Steve Potter, the former mentor of the UF researcher has a pretty thorough description of it. http://www.neuro.gatech.edu/groups/potter/animat.h tml
I know of similar work with sea slugs in an off-campus lab funded partly by UF (the Whitney Lab). I'm not _too_ familiar with it, so this may not be entirely accurate. Basically, they found that neurons in the brain of the seaslugs are always in the same positions as other animals of the same species. They then started training animals, much like pavlov's dogs, to close their siphon whenever they were electrically shocked on their tail (by touching the siphon whenever they were shocked so the animal would relate the 2 stimuli). They then could isolate the neurons in the brain and train then individually. Two neurons in a petri dish would gradually connect and then share information. At the moment the group is working on identifying which genes control what part of the brain, or something like that..
I'll bite. No, this doesn't necessarily mean that a rat could be trained to fly a plane. A rat has millions of neurons, but most of them are taken up full-time doing specific things (strangely enough, a lot of that is scent processing). But if you can define goals for the rat, you can probably train it to do a lot of things, including a subset of the plane-flying challenge.
You don't want to think of the neurons as "hardware" exactly, either. The process of building and training a neural network is about replacing the programming component of building a system, not about replacing the hardware. Writing a piece of software to fly a plane by itself is hard work--complicated task, not easily reduced to algorithmic instruction sets. Lots of tiny rule modifications needed to the basic set of "maintain altitude and heading". The trick with neural nets is that you set up the network, and then you train it by trial and error to do the task. It programs itself, essentially.
We can and do build neural net simulations in pure software, which is where most of the research has been done so far. But neural net simulations on computers are VERY computationally expensive and take up a shitload of memory, so there are limits as to how big you can make your simulation and still do anything with it. This is a big problem, because neural nets can potentially do incredibly interesting things (like, say sentience!) if they get big enough--but we don't have computers big enough to model neural nets as complicated as we'd like.
I know the article says that these guys are only using this project to investigate how neurons work in the real world, but the potential applications of this are big. Neural nets using actual neurons, not expensive simulations, could be cheap enough to build and train that they would find commercial uses.
What? How can you possibly assert that? I could make the same claim about you. All you are is a "bunch of neurons" that exhibits complex behavior. I have absolutely no reason to suspect that you are conscious. Sure, you act like you're conscious, but you're just saying that.
But is it self aware? At present I would doubt it, but maybe in the future, just maybe.
:-)
This I find fascinating. The moral ramifications are huge.
For starters if it becomes self aware, is it alive like us? If so are we no more than complex machines or is there something else?
Does the question even mean anything?
Years ago, patients with extreme cases of epilepsy were treated by severing the connection between the left and right halves of the brain. The theory was that this would prevent the "electrical storm" of the seizure from propagating from one side of the brain to the other. This would supposedly reduce the frequency and severity of the seizures.
As a result, these individuals had, in their skulls, two independent brains with no communication link between them (a simplification, but mostly accurate). These patients would report strange experiences, such as getting up out of a chair and walking to another room, without having any idea why they were doing it. Essentially, the two halves of their brains were functioning independently, and sometimes "fought" over what the body was going to do.
It's a very interesting question -- did the "person" go into the left half of the brain, or the right? If it went into the left side, for example, what happened to the right side? Is it now a soulless automaton? How can a single person exist in two conscious modes simultaneously? Yet these people live normal lives, for the most part.
Sadly, you are trolling. But you raise an interesting point.
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
"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory.
I have to say, I don't remember much from when I was five years old. I remember where I lived and maybe can guesstimate where I spent a specific summer, but most of my knowledge comes from what my parents told me and from little "text" snippets that somehow got stuck in my head (for example, names of cities I visited, etc.)
I can recall some images from the past, but I am not sure whether those are "true" memories or something synthesised by brain to "fill in the blank". This leads me to believe that human memory is rather lossy and large part of what I remember is just a rough approximation of what happened based on a few datapoints that brain actually remembers. Sort of like with people who have a defect in their iris - they still see an image in what's supposed to be a blind spot. This image is synthesised by brain to fill in the gap. Needless to say, occasionaly it turns deadly (especially while driving).
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
It's not too difficult to find a source of brains - visit your local abbatoir.
Wouldn't want to use the sheep brains though.... Imagine a "mob" of aircraft playing follow the leader...
Seriously, you would want to use something with a life span of more than a few years - besides, how do you do backups? how do you transfer existing knowledge to the new, untrained brain? (I mean more efficiently than us humans manage to using our existing I/O ports).
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
What makes you think a large simulation of a brain won't be conscious?
http://www.ad.com/
Deleted
...because I think (although I am talking out my ass here) neurons are exempt from the auto-immune response, so rejection of donor cells is a non-issue.
If you know, is this true?
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
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.
Still, we have crossed a line. I'm not sure exactly where that line was, but I do know that people will be angry that we've crossed it. For better, or for worse, it's been crossed, and there is no reason to go back, and undo the experiment, infact, you couldn't. It will be interesting to watch where this field of science will go.
If I could tell these scientists but one thing, that would be to use a great deal, a great deal of caution in what they do, and what could happen becuase of their results.
Sig
You better be vegetarian! I, for one, know of many larger and more common masses of neurons that definately can feel things that are having much worse existances than flying a virtual plane.
Well, neurons are living cells... ...and therefore they can reproduce. This is called neurogenesis...and as I understand it can be stimulated by appropriate amounts of neurotrophin and other chemicals.
However, with all animal brains, there comes a point in the creature's development where the death rate is greater than the birth rate. In humans it happens at about three years, if memory serves (heh). If we could manage to find the correct chemical balance to maintain an average cell count indefinately, then perhaps we could devise a dietary supplement that would have the same (or better) effect on humans...
Of course, giving a person a lot of neurons doesn't mean that person will make use of them...
Don't anthromorphize the neuron. Neurons self organize and process signals in completely unconscious structures with no sense of pleasure. The neurons of the spinal cord, retina, or enteric nervous system for instance. Self organization and signal processing is just what neurons do. We've known for some time that certain types of electrical stimulation (high frequency) can strengthen a connection where as other (low frequency) can weaken a connection. But how this turns into computation, we don't have a clue.
I am really excited about this. If we can standardize this process, this gives us a whole new in vitro method for studying how neurons learn. Then we can apply drugs, or knock out proteins, or even do fluorescent imaging on the live neurons as they think. This could be as big a leap forward in the understanding of the mind as PCR or western blotting have been to understanding the cell.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are certainly some amazing opportunities here to learn about how brains work, and no doubt this could help us in building better interfaces for cybernetic implants.
I just feel very uncomfortable with this kind of experimentation. It is my understanding that given enough complexity, any system has the potential to become self-aware. This plate has 25,000 neurons in a roughly two-dimensonal matrix (from the Wired article), so it's probably not even as smart as a bug so far (I am just guessing about this, does anyone have figures to compare this to?), but given enough space and time, might it not become sentient?
This reminds me of a similar experiment involving a fish brain controlling a robot. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1043001.stm
Then again - maybe I am being squeamish for no reason. After all, if your entire existence was flying imaginary planes, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
No its not. Whats commonly referred to as a lobotomy, is to remove or seperate the frontal lobes ( Higher functions ) and not seperate the two hemispheres of the brain.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
... 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.
Or to say "Mission Accomplished!"
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Ban all organism altering human concoctions because they just interfere with nature's natural way. It would be a shame to harm a living cell by taking medically prescribed drugs to aleive one of pain. To those with parkinson's disease, we, as humans, will no longer do anything for you because your hardship is nature's way of telling you that you suck and weeding you out. Headache? Too bad, suffer, it is natural. You think your headache is actually a symptom of a brain tumor, sucks to be you because we no longer do Cat Scans because the information we derive from them changes the natural path of nature. Being able to watch a nueral network grow and develop would be an extrodinary thing, that would change how we understand life, and how we understand computing, forever. It would shed light on mysteries that have bother us for years, but unfortunately, we can't go down that road, becuase in one persons view, studying it would simply be a "toy," and we can't have that.
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.
For a moment there, I thought you were going to say,
~Idarubicin
How are we to learn, if we don't experiment? These findings could directly and indirectly fundamentally improve our understanding of how the brain operates, and indeed make it so that we can study the workings of brains up close & personal without being invasive into a living creature - human, rat or otherwise.
Isn't that a good thing?
You kind of remind me of a quote from Steven Hawking regarding something the pope said..
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
How do you define "consciousness". Is an atom conscious? Chemical compound? Chemical reactions? A cell? 10 connected cells? 25,000 connected cells?
Is it when something that can 'learn'? We have computer programs that can learn.
Is something suddenly conscious when it neurons are connected? You have neurons in your leg, is your leg conscious?
Is it something can react with the enviroment? Sperm can react with the enviroment, is it conscious?
Define what it is you are actually against. They got a bunch of cells, and made it send electrical signals in a certin way.
As you say "a wise society is one that can do something, yet chooses not to and offers their reasoning for others to contemplate." But you have offered not reasoning other than to say YOU can't ethically deal with a bunch of cells sending electrochemical reactions to a few other cells and a computer.
Personally I would happly give them 25,000 of my some 100 billion neurons (In my brain alone) if it means that in the future someone who has brain damage can have their brain repaired and have their life go back to normal.
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
To a certain extent I do agree with you. Taking a conscious brain out of a rat and hooking it up to wires would be a horrible thing to do. If we want to play around with a brain we should build our own.
But isn't that more or less what they did here? It sounds like they're just taking a few cells out of a rat and then growing them on a dish. We've done this for ages, growing cells and bacteria on dishes and used for all kinds of research and other things.
When you say start from scratch, to what level of complexity should we go. Creating our own cells? Creating our own polymer? Creating our own molecules? We certainly couldn't create our own atoms. In this experiment they went to a level so low that there were no consciousness, isn't that what's important?
Also, isn't it just as important how high level of complexity you build out of those blocks, I.e. if you build something as intelligent as a cell, or as a fly, or as an animal. I would argue that this is much more important. If we build something that can have feelings and emotions, does it really matter if that thing is built out of chemical cells or electric transistors?
Yes, there are certainly boundries that must not be crossed in this type of research, but I don't think there was enough information in either article to say that that boundry was crossed.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to put one person's heart inside another person's chest. If you want to give someone a working heart, fine, but grow one "from scratch". I "know" transplants are just "wrong".
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to give one person the blood of another. If you need blood to save someone's life, then create blood "from scratch". I "know" transfusions are just "wrong".
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to perform artificial insemination. If you want to help people who are trying to have children, you should er... create a child from scratch? Or maybe just pray for them (a lot)? Anyway, I "know" IVF is just "wrong".
Guess what, creating those things "from scratch" is very, very hard. And assuming someone put the time and effort into it and created them, what then? A neuron would still be a neuron, whether it came from a brain or from a test tube. And if your problem is with the (abstract) "mind", then how do you manage to turn off your PC? A modern computer, running a modern OS, displays more "intelligent" behaviour than many insects. Is a "mind" any less "sacred" if it's silicon-based, instead of carbon-based?
These experiments are very much right, and should have been done a long time ago. Modern medicine can do amazing things with muscle and bone and skin, but nearly all nervous and neural diseases are impossible to cure or even treat. A lot more research is needed.
Neurons are no more "sacred" than any other cell type (spermatozoons, for example). In fact, millions of both are wasted every second.
Just because a lettuce can't scream that doesn't mean it can't feel. Think about that next time you have a salad. At least some cows want to be eaten.
There you go asserting things again to which you have no proof.
[that behaviour is not as complicated as that shown by organisms that we can reasonably assume to be conscious - people.]
Do you think a baby is concious? If yes, is a cat that is able to exhibit more complex behavior than the baby , concious? Where is your dividing line?
~561
An interesting post - too bad we dont have more discussions like this on slashdot.
Ethical issues are certainly something to be considered - but this does not neccesarily just apply to biological neural networks. I dont see any reason why we shouldnt apply the same concerns to neural networks in software or silicon. Although instinct suggests to me that a biological network is going to be the most similar to the real thing and therefore more likely to offer closer similarities.
My personal take on conciousness is that it is an emergent behaviour. For example imagine a brain that is kept alive- but has never received any sensory input. Its fairly likely that it couldnt be concious - because conciousness requires processes based on accumulated knowledge. Whether that is learned by cause and effect - as a baby learns quickly what actions to get a feed. The more choices we have , the more knowledge we have and the more we are able use these things to effect the world around us or to enjoy the things in the world around us.
It is also important to consider more lowly lifeforms which exhibit conciousness. One of my favorite examples is the "Bower Bird". The bower bird exhibits true creativity. The male bower bird attracts females by collecting colorful petals, butterfly wings and other items. And by arranging these items in a specific way create a beautiful display. (experiments were performed whereby a scientist rearranged pieces - the birds would put them in the correct spot again)
Female birds then select a prospective mate by selecting the nest it finds most appealing.
What this shows is that these birds can be considered truly creative in that they can both create a work whilst also being able to appreciate the work of others.
To me this example highlights the fact that we should not make the mistake of thinking that it is only the larger - higher level animals that exhibit a complex conciousness.
Anyone interested in these kinds of issues and discussions should look at some of the work by Daniel C Dennet
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/biblio.htm
In particular his book
"Conciousness Explained"
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
The brain is fully functional even when sliced in two, however it does lead to some really fascinating side effects brought about by the differing functions of the two sides.
In effect, we all have two brains, they do different things but by communication we end up with a single whole brain, once you cut the CC you're back to two brains, with different capabilities. Most of the time you won't notice the difference because the brains compensate adequately, but in certain situations you can expose some truely bizarre features.
(http://www.schiffermd.com/dualbrain.html)
Here's another interesting link with details about one case which through having an unusual development of language in both sides of the brain the experimenters were able to discover that the two brains (after separation) were vastly different in thier ideas, rigt down to what job the person would like to lead (race car driver vs draghtsman!).
http://www.macalester.edu/~psych/whathap/UBNRP/
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings