from Hacker News

Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong

by rogerian on 10/13/22, 11:34 AM with 137 comments

by sidewndr46 on 10/14/22, 9:58 PM
A question for someone who understands the neurology and biology of this much more than I do:
Once I have a group of neurons like this trained to do something, can I actually count on them to continue performing that task until they die? Or is it possible they spontaneously reorganize or "learn" a previously unseen behavioral pattern?
by seydor on 10/14/22, 9:53 PM
i would urge people to read the paper instead. The 'learning' is a bit iffy , and this was meant to test the brain theory of Friston rather than plug neurons into pong. Still, great job on the neurotechnology involved and a step in the direction where we should be going, controlling large numbers of neurons
Ars Technica has a better article, although they dont describe the dense electode array correctly: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/a-dish-of-neurons-ma...
by superkuh on 10/14/22, 9:26 PM
This is about 40x more cells than they used to fly a fighter jet in a simulation back in 2004. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1572 .
I suppose the claim to fame in this similar study is the use of the title organoid and there's some legitimacy to that. Form and function are intimately tied in the brain and just a bunch of neurons on a petri dish isn't quite an organ.
by yazzku on 10/15/22, 1:06 AM
Funny how everybody here panics about 'the hell' of experimenting with human brains that could possibly grow consciousness. What about the actual hell we put animals through so that we can eat them? There are also studies suggesting that, for example, crows and other animals have some form of consciousness:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/crows-consciousne...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-crows-possess-f...
You don't need to imagine hell, it's already here.
by d--b on 10/15/22, 3:42 AM
> he work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence
Absolutely not. This shows that you can teach neurons to exhibit a reflex behavior adapted to the given stimuli - which shouldn’t come as a surprise. At best this is jellyfish-like level of intelligence.
by ALittleLight on 10/14/22, 10:06 PM
They are using human neurons for this? The one substrate we can be sure of is capable of producing consciousness?
by ummonk on 10/15/22, 2:07 AM
It seems needlessly provocative to use human neurons to do this. Presumably they could have had the same effects with neurons from another species. It’s like they want to provoke a backlash from religious people against scientific experimentation.
by im3w1l on 10/15/22, 12:50 AM
So we can create microbrains of human neurons. Cool. But what about a gigabrain? Something smarter than all of us?
For the record I do think such a creation should have personhood. And have the right to learn about and interact with the real world.
by Manuel_D on 10/15/22, 5:30 AM
I wonder if in the future we'll have some sort of FPGA formed by a neural dish. Hook up an HDMI port to a cube of neurons and it OCRs text or tracks objects. I suspect biological variations in cells would make the results inconsistent, and far inferior to what we can do with semiconductors presently, but it's cool to think about.
by grepfru_it on 10/15/22, 1:02 AM
Here's an article that's almost 20 years old on a similar topic
https://web.archive.org/web/20041023144731/https://www.wired...
https://web.archive.org/web/20041106064802/http://www.napa.u...
EDIT: it seems the researcher working on this project passed away recently :(
by theflyingelvis on 10/15/22, 2:29 AM
Maybe they could run for senate in my home state
by GolfPopper on 10/15/22, 3:24 AM
SF author (and marine biologist) Peter Watts described something very much like this, only more advanced, in his book Maelstrom (2001):
"Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren't. They didn't have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No instincts. No desires. Just a porridge of cultured neurons, really: four-digit IQs that didn't give a rat's ass whether they even lived or died. Somehow they learned through operant conditioning, although they lacked the capacity either to enjoy reward or suffer punishment. Their pathways formed and dissolved with all the colorless indifference of water shaping a river delta."
Much of his work, including Maelstrom, is freely available on his own website:https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
by odrekf on 10/15/22, 1:21 AM
I tried to reply to someone but he got censored for pointing out that if you care about two neurons you should care about the animals that go through hell in the meat/dairy industry. Here's my reply:
One can't hope to truly know if another individual (be it a human or any other animal) is conscious (the hard problem of consciousness). But if it has eyes like us, mouth like us, plays like us, cries/screams when hurt like us, and even seem to dream like us (asleep dogs sometimes move like they are running in their dreams, and when they wake up they look confused and still perturbed from what they were seeing in their minds), it makes perfect sense to assume that they are conscious like us, and it's the ethical thing to do.
by _spduchamp on 10/15/22, 12:24 AM
DishBrain is better for marketing than DishNightmares.
by ofou on 10/15/22, 12:23 AM
It's interesting to see research like this coming up. It might inform AI in unpredicted ways IMO.
"In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...
by m3kw9 on 10/15/22, 3:37 PM
Wonder then they can plug in a camera and output the visual from the brain from recall. And would that be called consciousness?
by lvass on 10/15/22, 3:27 AM
Do we have an open source PetriNeuronSDK to communicate with these yet? I can't wait until we get cloud neurons IaaS.
by yieldcrv on 10/15/22, 5:54 AM
Makes me wonder how many states there are in a neuron.
Like, they are similar to transistors but have more states than off (0) and on (1).
by norwalkbear on 10/15/22, 4:21 PM
They also grew eye like structures too right.
by ruined on 10/14/22, 11:48 PM
hell is real
by janci on 10/15/22, 9:11 AM
Next step: run Doom
by austinjp on 10/15/22, 11:12 AM
From the website of the lab doing this https://corticallabs.com
Human neural networks raised in a simulation
The neurons exist inside our Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS). biOS runs the simulation and sends information about their environment, with positive or negative feedback. It interfaces with the neurons directly. As they react, their impulses affect their digital world.
Our first minds
The dishbrain is currently being developed at the CL0 laboratory in Melbourne, AU. We bring these neurons to life, and integrate them into The biOS with a mixture of hard silicon and soft tissue. Our first cohort have learnt to play Pong. They grow, adapt and learn as we do.
Silicon meets neuron
Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them everything they need to be happy and healthy. Their physical growth is across a silicon chip, which has a set of pins that send electrical impulses into the neural structure, and receive impulses back in return.
The Ultimate Learning Machine
Those actions have a positive or negative effect in biOS, which the mind perceives, adapting to improve that feedback. The human neuron is self programming, infinitely flexible, the result of four billion years of evolution. What digital models try and emulate, we begin with.
Why?
There are many advantages to organic-digital intelligence. Lower power costs, more intuition, insight and creativity in our intelligences. But most importantly we are driven by three core questions.
What will we discover if our intelligences train themselves?
We know an organic mind is a better learner than any digital model. It can switch tasks easily, and bring learnings from one task to another. But more important is what we don’t know. What are the limits of a mind connected to infinity? What can it do with data it literally lives in?
What happens if we take a shortcut to generalised intelligence?
Machine Learning algorithms are a poor copy of the way an organic neural network functions. So we’re starting with the neuron, replacing decades of algorithms with millions of years of evolution. What happens as these native intelligences start solving the problems we’d previously left to software?
How can we surpass the limits of silicon?
Silicon is raw, rigid, unchanging. Our organic neural networks sit on top of this raw power, but the way they grow and evolve isn’t limited to the software they run on. There is no software, it's coded in their DNA. How will computing change as we shift from hard silicon to soft tissue?
RFN: Request For Neurons
The dishbrain is learning and growing in biOS today, and soon we’re opening an early access preview for selected developers. The biOS is our simulation environment, where you can program tasks, challenges and objectives for our minds. Join our developer program to get early access to our SDK, and secure training time with our minds.
by yrgulation on 10/14/22, 10:00 PM
Proper ai.
by jjtheblunt on 10/15/22, 1:20 AM
If there are extraterrestrials, "Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong" is probably the sort of thing they say while watching us from their UFOs.