Disembodied Rat Brain Flies F-22 Sim

[Guest ericvano]

Creep-o-riffic.

Is That a Pilot in Your Pocket? By Lakshmi Sandhana

Story location:

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65438,00.html

02:00 AM Oct. 23, 2004 PT

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living "brain" that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its "body" -- the simulated aircraft.

"It's as if the neurons control the stick in the aircraft, they can move it back and forth and left and right," said Thomas DeMarse, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida who has been working on the project for more than a year. "The electrodes allow us to record the activity from the neurons and stimulate them so we can listen to the conversation among the neurons and also input information back into the neural network."

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn't figured out how to control its "body," but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight.

"Right now the process it's learning is very simplistic," said DeMarse. "It's basically making a decision about whether to move the stick to the left or to the right or forwards and backwards and it learns how much to push the stick depending upon how badly the aircraft is flying."

The seed idea for DeMarse's autopilot came out of earlier work with Steve Potter on the Animat project, where researchers used living rat neurons to control an animated object in a virtual world. They also connected the neurons to a robot and tried to teach the brain to track and approach objects.

The bigger goal is to figure out how neurons talk to each other. MRI scans, for example, show millions of neurons firing together. At that resolution, it is impossible to see what's happening between individual neurons. While scientists can study neural activities from groups of cells in a dish, they can't watch them learn and grow as they would within a living body unless the neurons have some kind of body to interact with.

By taking these cells and giving them back a "body," the researchers hope to uncover how the neurons communicate with each other and eventually translate that knowledge to develop novel computing architecture.

"Granted, this is just a handful of neurons in a dish," said Potter, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's neuroengineering laboratory. "It isn't a full-blown brain. It doesn't have a real body. But with this kind of system you can literally watch these things compute and you have a chance to learn how the brain does its computation."

DeMarse plans to make the autopilot more competent by having the brain use a horizon to judge how it controls the plane. But the true breakthrough will come about when the researchers detect how neurons communicate in a network.

"We know some of the rudimentary rules," said DeMarse. "We just don't quite understand the language that they use to do their computations. We can extract the general features from it to control the aircraft but there's a lot more information buried in the signals that they are using, and we simply don't know what that is. So there's a lot more to do in terms of understanding the language of the network."

[ 08. December 2005, 09:00: Message edited by: Coach Z ]

[BFM this]

Behold SKYNET:

[Vandal]

That is like something I read in a Dale brown novel, but even more creepy.

[Guest Aflyer]

That is like something I read in a Dale brown novel, but even more creepy.

Day of the Cheetah?

That is a good book - very fantastical at the time, but it seems we're headed down that path. To that end, I agree with the previous - creepy.

[Vandal]

That would be the one.

[M2]

My alma mater hard at work! If they could get my rat brain to work, why not this??

Cheers! M2

[Guest POL_Pilot]

Did we not learn anything from the movie "STEALTH"?

[Jkarl]

Whats next:

[pcola]

Hey, if a disembodied rat brain can fly, by god, my IP's may have been wrong, and there's hope for me yet.

[Guest PilotKD]

Oh great. Wait until the higher-ups find out rat brains in a dish can fly an F-22. There goes the pilot bonus!

[Guest rangerbob5]

Many comments will be made in Phase II UPT by quick-witted FAIPs about students ability to fly straight and level...

[FalconXtreme]

Originally posted by POL_Pilot:

Did we not learn anything from the movie "STEALTH"?

or the terminator trilogy or the matrix trilogy? we're all doooooooomed

[DC]

I just realized that this article is a year+ old. It seems to be circulating the internet now because I just got an e-mail with a link to a different article on this topic from someone. Strange that it'd be making the rounds a year later.

My friend who sent it to me is in med school. His e-mail came with a snide little comment about me having to look up for back-up career plans.

I finished my response with: But hey, if a dog can diagnose cancer (link) and PRAYING TO JESUS (link) will cure it, I'm sure future doctors are desperately trying to come up with back-up career plans too.

[ 12. December 2005, 22:12: Message edited by: DC ]