[HN Gopher] In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells h...
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In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells has learned to
play Pong
Author : areoform
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-06-02 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| nawgz wrote:
| Wish I could read this whole paper. DishBrain sounds absolutely
| horrifying.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| We should stop doing things like this.
| Idiot_in_Vain wrote:
| That's what she said :)
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| Why?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| said every luddite for the last 10 thousand years.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| How many brain cells do you string together before the
| DishBrain gets some semblance of sentience? How many before
| it becomes conscious?
|
| We don't know, of course. Perhaps consciousness isn't
| possible without a live body. Or perhaps it takes just a few
| hundred thousand neurons.
|
| In the meantime, you run the risk of torturing a potentially
| conscious entity for...what gain exactly?
| ok_dad wrote:
| I don't think the Luddite philosophy applies in this case, I
| think OP may have been speaking about the morality or ethics
| of growing a brain in a dish? Luddism is more about when the
| capitalist class steals worker productivity gains for
| themselves, and is a pretty valid philosophy for today, when
| the capitalists are trying to replace thinking humans
| wholesale with computer AI.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| TIL what a luddite is: apparently they started in 1811 and
| were named after Ned Ludd, a textile worker in England. So
| what was the characteristic called in 1810?
| pessimizer wrote:
| According to who you're replying to, they're actually
| 10,000 years old, and complain about scientific research,
| rather than about being pushed out of their textile jobs by
| machinery.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Stop experimenting on in vitro biological systems of cultured
| brain cells? Why?
| api wrote:
| In Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy (a series of sci-fi novels) there
| are large cultured masses of neurons used as a form of AI and
| nicknamed "head cheese."
| m3kw9 wrote:
| We need this aws service, maybe call it "Real Brain". You train
| it, except you cannot untrain it
| frisco wrote:
| Interestingly, this is not a new result; people have been doing
| stuff like this since at least the 90s, most notably Steve Potter
| at GA Tech and Tom DeMarse in Florida.[1][2] (I built a shitty
| counterstrike aimbot using a cultured neural network in college
| based on their papers.)
|
| There was a lot of coverage back in 2004 when DeMarse hooked it
| up to a flight simulator and claimed it was flying an F-22 [3]
| (lol, but I don't blame him too much...)
|
| The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode
| array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be "inputs"
| and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate both ends
| the cells wire together more or less according to Hebb's rule[4]
| and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings.
|
| On the other hand, these cultures have essentially no advantage
| over digital computers and modern machine learning models. Once
| you get through the initial cool factor, you realize it's a pain
| to keep the culture perfectly sterile, fed, supplied with the
| right gases, among many other practical problems, for a model
| which is just much less powerful, introspectable, and debuggable
| than is possible on digital computers.
|
| [1] https://bpb-
| us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/fi...
|
| [2] https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/
|
| [3] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
| sroussey wrote:
| We have lots of these cultures around for drug testing. I
| wonder if the "brain" playing pong affects the tests in any
| way.
| api wrote:
| What I always wonder about with these systems is how feedback
| was delivered to the cultured neurons. How do we tell them
| they're doing things correctly? Or is this some form of
| unsupervised learning with them?
| seydor wrote:
| the original paper is available
| https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6
|
| They used a specific region of the electrode array to deliver
| the "reward" signal which was a regular predictable pulse
| pattern . An error was represented with unpredictable
| activity
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I was with you up to "once you get over the cool factor." It
| seems impossible to get over how cool it is to have a minibrain
| playing video games. Having one of those at home must really
| impress the girls.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Moreover, if there are girls not impressed by this, you will
| know, and have really dodged a bullet.
| seydor wrote:
| "played video games" is overstatement. There was a slight
| increase in the performance with the particular setup that
| they used. It was not as straightforward as it sounds. This
| kind of science is still in its infancy
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| "Meet my brother. He's adopted"
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode
| array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be
| "inputs" and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate
| both ends the cells wire together more or less according to
| Hebb's rule[4] and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings.
|
| This is fascinating, can you clarify it a bit? Do you
| 'stimulate', e.g. apply electrical potential to both the inputs
| and outputs to represent each instance of training data,
| without any physical distinction between input and output at
| that stage? And then if you apply the potential only the
| inputs, you can then read predictions on the outputs?
| 1-6 wrote:
| It's fascinating how brain cells outside of its host can do
| simple tricks like play pong. Perhaps these scientists need a new
| marketing department because DishBrain isn't quite appetizing.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Maybe they can do more than play pong. Is "the host" something
| more than machinery, a vehicle, to a big clump of brain cells?
| Is there a soul? Or is it all an illusion
|
| I've tried cow brain twice and it was delicious.
| harveywi wrote:
| DishBrain's elevator pitch: Neural networks meet fava beans and
| a nice Chianti.
| juliusgeo wrote:
| Maybe they could rebrand to "Brainlent Green".
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Can it play doom?
| bilsbie wrote:
| Do they use gradient descent? Otherwise how do they train?
| kanzure wrote:
| The whole field of biological intelligence needs a ChatGPT
| moment. There's at least four or five different companies running
| around trying to do this with biological neurons, but
| unfortunately pong just isn't a spectacular demo.
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