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Robot Controlled By Rat Brain
kkleiner writes "Kevin Warwick, once a cyborg and still a researcher in cybernetics at the University of Reading, has been working on creating biological neural networks that can control machines. He and his team have taken the brain cells from rats, cultured them, and used them as the guidance control circuit for simple wheeled robots. Electrical impulses from the bot enter the batch of neurons, and responses from the cells are turned into commands for the device. The cells can form new connections, making the system a true learning machine."
Here's a rat cyborg who used to be our overlord. As to cyborgs, Warwick was never a cyborg. Implanting a chip that does nothing whatever doesn't make you a cyborg, but a pacemaker does. To be a cyborg you have to have a device implanted in your body that aids in the body's function; a pacemaker, an artificial hip or knee, a cochlear implant, an accomodating IOL, etc. Implanting a chip that does nothing is just stupid.
Your grandma's probably a real cyborg.
Free Martian Whores!
I suppose that would depend on how you define and perceive "machine." After all, is a microprocessor a machine? How about RAM? How about programmable chips that can reconfigure themselves into various networks of transistors? Is it because there is biology instead of nano-construction involved? The reality is that we don't yet have technology that can match what naturally occurring neural networks can do... not yet. But by making use of these small samples, we can begin to interface with them and then start building our own after learning to work with them enough to predict their behaviors.
In time, the rat brain cells will be replaced with something synthetic. Once that is done, will it then be a machine even when the functionality becomes identical?
The cells are harvested from a rat foetus. They're grown in a special vessel, where they're in contact with an array of electrodes. They spontaneously arrange themselves into a neural network. The difficult part is training that network to do anything useful.
Which is exactly why it is NOT wired to a rat brain. These are cultured cells, seperated and grown in culture. So it's rat NEURONS but not a rat's brain. Calling it a rat brain would be like calling a heap of randomly wired intel-made-transistors a core2duo.