Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Video Game Pong (bbc.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have grown brain cells in a lab that have learned to play the 1970s tennis-like video game, Pong. They say their "mini-brain" can sense and respond to its environment. Writing in the journal Neuron, Dr Brett Kagan, of the company Cortical Labs, claims to have created the first ''sentient'' lab-grown brain in a dish. Other experts describe the work as ''exciting'' but say calling the brain cells sentient is going too far. "We could find no better term to describe the device,'' Dr Kagan says. ''It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time."
The research team: grew human brain cells grown from stem cells and some from mouse embryos to a collection of 800,000; connected this mini-brain to the video game via electrodes revealing which side the ball was on and how far from the paddle. In response, the cells produced electrical activity of their own. They expended less energy as the game continued. But when the ball passed a paddle and the game restarted with the ball at a random point, they expended more recalibrating to a new unpredictable situation. The mini-brain learned to play in five minutes. It often missed the ball -- but its success rate was well above random chance. Although, with no consciousness, it does not know it is playing Pong in the way a human player would, the researchers stress.
Dr Kagan hopes the technology might eventually be used to test treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "When people look at tissues in a dish, at the moment they are seeing if there is activity or no activity. But the purpose of brain cells is to process information in real time," he says. "Tapping into their true function unlocks so many more research areas that can be explored in a comprehensive way." Next, Dr Kagan plans to test the impact alcohol has on the mini-brain's ability to play Pong. If it reacts in a similar way to a human brain, this would underscore just how effective the system might be as an experimental stand-in. As the "mini-brains" become more complex, Dr Kagan's team says they'll be working with bioethicists to ensure they do not accidentally create a conscious brain.
"We have to see this new technology very much like the nascent computer industry, when the first transistors were janky prototypes, not very reliable -- but after years of dedicated research, they led to huge technological marvels across the world," he says.
The research team: grew human brain cells grown from stem cells and some from mouse embryos to a collection of 800,000; connected this mini-brain to the video game via electrodes revealing which side the ball was on and how far from the paddle. In response, the cells produced electrical activity of their own. They expended less energy as the game continued. But when the ball passed a paddle and the game restarted with the ball at a random point, they expended more recalibrating to a new unpredictable situation. The mini-brain learned to play in five minutes. It often missed the ball -- but its success rate was well above random chance. Although, with no consciousness, it does not know it is playing Pong in the way a human player would, the researchers stress.
Dr Kagan hopes the technology might eventually be used to test treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "When people look at tissues in a dish, at the moment they are seeing if there is activity or no activity. But the purpose of brain cells is to process information in real time," he says. "Tapping into their true function unlocks so many more research areas that can be explored in a comprehensive way." Next, Dr Kagan plans to test the impact alcohol has on the mini-brain's ability to play Pong. If it reacts in a similar way to a human brain, this would underscore just how effective the system might be as an experimental stand-in. As the "mini-brains" become more complex, Dr Kagan's team says they'll be working with bioethicists to ensure they do not accidentally create a conscious brain.
"We have to see this new technology very much like the nascent computer industry, when the first transistors were janky prototypes, not very reliable -- but after years of dedicated research, they led to huge technological marvels across the world," he says.
We don't really know what consciousness is (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: We don't really know what consciousness is (Score:2)
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I've seen this movie before. I don't like the ending.
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Why not keep growing the cells until their number exceeds our natural brains? See if we can teach it to speak, so it can teach us things we havent thought of yet?
Yes, this will happen in the foreseeable future. Not centuries, probably not even decades from now. Time will tell the utility of artificial biological brains. The future of humanity will look entirely different if they are successful.
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I think human-level intelligence involves more than just raw number of neurons. You need specialised areas. Whale brain has about twice [wikipedia.org] the number of neurons that humans do but whales don't appear to be more intelligent than humans.
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We don't really know what consciousness is yet, so how can we avoid accidentally creating it? (unlikely, but not inconceivable)
Exactly. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is. Currently known Physics does not even have a mechanism for it.
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At the start, it is useful to divide the associated
problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of
consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive
science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural
mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.
The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following
phenomena:
- the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react
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If you don't even know what it is how can you say there's no mechanism for it?
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Currently known Physics does not even have a mechanism for it.
Physicists can't explain dark matter either. So what?
Oh, Lord (Score:1)
"Sentient"? "Mini-brains"? This guy is a self-promoting clown.
Video Games (Score:2)
So video games DON'T rot your brain...
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good time to mention Starfish (Score:3, Interesting)
by Peter Watts
https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]
Great book. The AIs in the book are wetware, clumps of brain cells which are used as AIs wherever you happen to need one.
Wrote it many years ago based on research he had read about, excellent prognostication on his part.
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In the manga Mahoromatic, which ran from '98 to '04 (and mentioned only tangentially in the anime) human brains.. kid's brains.. were disembodied by a shady organization called "Management" (which secretly rules the world from some island) and wired up to infrastructure, as bio-computers. These brains ran the elevators, the lights, the HVAC.. and even the toilets. While still sentient. >.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yeah, it's a android maid rom-com.. sure.
Disturbing, that people can even conceiv
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oh, lack of hitting preview strikes again..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I never did watch the anime, although I had planned to catch it at some point. Just checked and it's not available on Crunchyroll. Seems like I really might have missed out on the manga though, I'll have to go have a read.
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It's on hidive https://www.hidive.com/tv/maho... [hidive.com]
worst streamer ever, but hey. (I do have the whole thing on dvd, plus the specials) Hidive doesn't have the specials
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A fantastic book, one of the few where the heroes of the novel are almost unpleasant, but with solid reasoning for them to be that way. I believe sequels have been written, but I've not tried to track them down.
"We could find no better term..." (Score:4, Insightful)
We had functional autopilots as early as 1912 [wikipedia.org]. In 1947 a USAF C-53 took off, flew across the Atlantic, and landed completely autonomously.
And I don't think anyone is going to call a Tesla's responding-to-outside-stimuli-and-responding-in-real-time "sentient".
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WWII.. tanks started getting gyro stabilizers for the main gun, something similar to the autopilots of the era. First vertical axis, and later on both.
And of course the Germans would test theirs in the modern era like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: "We could find no better term..." (Score:2)
Outside help? (Score:1)
Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Video Games (Score:2)
"You heard it here first, folks. Mamma is going to be so proud."
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Brain Cells are getting dumber.
This seems..nightmarish (Score:2)
I don't think the terminology being used here is accurate, with sentient and brain being used, but, what if it was.
I can't help feel bad for this little under-powered being, trying its best to play pong but missing a lot of the time and just really struggling, because we couldn't make it any better with our current tech.
To hell with ethics (Score:2)
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Scientists have been putting human brains in jars and experimenting with them for five or so years now.
Everyone is just fine with this ?
wow. (Score:2)
That hints that we really are missing something in how brains operate.
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This is many more brain cells than some insects have (and they exhibit much more complex/interesting behavior).
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You can play pong with something like 100 transistors (including the "game-engine" itself, but not the screen). That is wayyyyy less than the complexity of a single brain cell.
First pong... (Score:1)
Next up... management.
Capable of playing Pong? (Score:1)
About as smart as me, then!
Dupe (Score:2)
This was already posted. Get it together, slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/04/10/24/0024241/flying-by-brain [slashdot.org]
Concerned (Score:3)
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I was wondering the same thing . What's the feedback for learning ?
However I think you may be wrong about pain. We don't have to beat babies to get them to play. Pleasure is the evident reward. And pain is different that the absence of pleasure. Indeed too much pleasure may not even be a goodthing
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Obligatory Star Trek reference (Score:2)
Ah... I see we are ahead of schedule on the development of bio-neural gel packs [fandom.com].