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Mapping the Brain's Neural Network
Ponca City, We Love You writes "New technologies could soon allow scientists to generate a complete wiring diagram of a piece of brain. With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Only one organism's complete wiring diagram now exists: that of the microscopic worm C. elegans, which contains a mere 302 neurons. The C. elegans mapping effort took more than a decade to complete. Research teams at MIT and at Heidelberg in Germany are experimenting with different approaches to speed up the process of mapping neural connections. The Germans start with a small block of brain tissue and bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers. They then take a very thin slice, 30 nanometers, off the top of the block. 'Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain,' says the lead researcher. They are training an artificial neural network to emulate the human process of tracing neural connections to speed the process about 100- to 1000-fold. They estimate that they need a further factor of a million to analyze useful chunks of the human brain in reasonable times."
They are training an artificial neural network to emulate the human process of tracing neural connections to speed the process about 100- to 1000-fold.
So, they're training a neural network to automate the process of mapping a neural network, in the hopes of creating an intelligence that they can train to automate other processes?
My brain hurts...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"It would be very difficult to get something useful out of it. Answers wouldn't always be the same due to the semi-random effect brains have a tendency to produce. You would spend a lifetime putting something in and watching it come back differently than it did a few minutes ago."
We call this "raising children"
--
BMO
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
Farnsworth: Lie down here and we'll do some tests. If Fry is out there, then Leela's brain could be acting as a five-pound Ouija board.
Leela: Is this some sort of brain scanner?
Farnsworth: Some sort, yes. In France, it's called a guillotine.
Leela: Professor! Can't you examine my brain without removing it?
Farnsworth: Yes, easily!
[worm has] only like 302 neurons,so,it's possible to write a simulator of it?
while (! dead) {
if (leftTenticalSensesFood()){wiggle(left);}
if (rightTenticalSensesFood()){wiggle(right);}
if (frontTenticalSensesFood()){munch();}
if (femaleWormEncountered()){fuckTheWigglyMamma();}
}
end();
Table-ized A.I.
while (! dead) {if (leftTenticalSensesFood()){wiggle(left);} if (rightTenticalSensesFood()){wiggle(right);} if (frontTenticalSensesFood()){munch();} if (femaleWormEncountered()){fuckTheWigglyMamma();}
}
Hey, that's *my* life! I call prior art.