There is a dish of living brain cells.
About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, according to a team report.
There is an effort to understand how the brain learns and how to make computers more intelligent.
"Silicon computing has made huge strides, but they are still rigid and inflexible," says the author of the study and chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs. We don't see that with biology.
A cup of tea can be made by both computers and people. People are able to generalize what they have learned.
He says you can make a decent cup of tea if you've got the ingredients. Even a very powerful computer wouldn't be able to do that task in an unfamiliar place.
Cortical Labs is trying to understand how living brain cells get intelligence. The company wanted to answer a question about how a network of brain cells learns to change their behavior.
Will the cells be able to change in a goal directed way if we allow them to know the outcome of their actions?
The scientists were able to find out by using a system called DishBrain.
A layer of living cells is grown on a chip at the bottom of a dish. The chip that is linked to a computer can both detect and deliver electrical signals.
The computer created a game of pong, a two-dimensional version of table tennis that gained a cult following as one of the first and most basic video games.
There is a game on the screen. Each player's paddle can be moved up or down to intercept a white ball, and the table is defined by a black rectangular shape.
There was a single paddle on the left side of the virtual table in the simplified version of the experiment.
The computer told the brain cells where the bouncing ball was so they could play the game. The cells were being monitored in the form of electrical signals.
The information we took influenced the game they were playing. The paddle could be moved around.
The cells did not understand the signals coming from the computer or what to do with them. There was no reason for them to play the game.
If the scientists got it right, they would use electrical stimulation to motivate the cells. The result was a stream of white noise.
They were given something predictable if they hit the ball. They got something that was completely unpredictable when they missed it.
According to the Free Energy Principle, brain cells want to be able to predict what is happening in their environment. They chose predictable stimulation over unpredictable stimulation.
The approach was successful. Cells were learning to generate electrical activity that would move the paddle in front of the ball.
The brain cells didn't do well at pong. Human brain cells seem to achieve a higher level of play than mouse brain cells.
The level of play was amazing, considering that each network had less cells than the brain of a roaches.
He says that if you could see a roaches playing a game of pong and it was able to hit the ball twice as often as it was missing it, you would be impressed.
The results show that biology can help computers become more intelligent by changing how they learn.
Potter is an associate professor at Georgia Tech.
He says that the idea of a computer that has some living components is exciting. The kinds of learning that these things can do is not very advanced.
Potter believes that the system that allowed cells to learn Pong could be used for research.
He says that this is a semi- living animal model that can be used to study all sorts of mechanisms in the nervous system.
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