Learning to Play Pong with Neural Networks in the Brain of a Young Macaque and Other Human-Generated Cells

Researchers connected the neurons – the cells responsible for receiving sensory input from the external world and for sending motor commands to muscles – of humans and mice to a computer, where neurons were made aware if their paddle was making contact with the ball.

Scientists used software to analyze instances when the neurons missed. A paper published in the journal Neuron claims to show that the brain’s nerves can adapt activity to a changing environment.

There are some promising results that show what can be done. Study coauthor Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, and his team recently showed that brain cells can learn to play Pong, the video game.

It was one of the first games used in machine learning and the team chose it due to its simplicity and familiarity. His team is trying out more than one game.

In the short term, the technology could be used to find better drug discovery, modeling disease and understanding how intelligence arises, as well as to develop new algorithm for machine learning.

It talks about the fundamental aspects of being a human and what it means to live in a changing world, so that you can be as smart as possible.

He believes it could be a basis for a type of information processor that is used in areas such as robotics where processing information is critical.

Hon Weng Chong, the founder of Cortical Labs and the lead researcher, as well as two of the paper authors, have various patents pending on the Pong-playing neurons.

Last year, Neuralink, the implant company owned by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, released a video in which a monkey appears to play Pong using only its mind.

A Neuralink device is implanted in the brain of a 9-year-old male macaque named Pager, according to a video posted by the company.

Neuralink is developing Bluetooth-enabled implantable chips that can communicate with computers via a small receiver, and has previously demonstrated the technology in pigs.

The somatosensory cortices of newborn rats are used to transplant clusters of human cells. Over several months, the organoids grew to occupy about one-third of the hemisphere of the rat brains. There was research published in the journal Nature. A professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania is excited about what organoids can do in terms of integration into the brain.

The transplants that Chen and others tried in adult rodents didn’t work out. In the latest attempt, the Stanford scientists transplanted the organoids early in development, when the young rats’ neuronal circuits weren’t fully formed. The adult brain is much less plastic, meaning it’s not able to change and form new connections as easily. “The nervous system has a way of shutting down development,” said Sergiu Pasca, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and the corresponding author on the study, in a press briefing ahead of the paper’s publication. “We went in and we transplanted before the ability for cells to form connections had stopped.”

“We know that the brain develops and works by receiving activity, either from endogenous networks or from the outside world through sensory stimulation of the tissue,” says Paola Arlotta, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, who wasn’t involved in the Stanford research. In a real brain, sensory stimulation is vital to forming neural pathways and promoting normal development.

“Their team is already testing this with brain organoids,” Hartung said. The basic definition of OI is replicating an experiment with organoids. From hereon, it’s just a matter of building the community, the tools, and the technologies to realize OI’s full potential.”

Hartung and his colleagues laid out a plan for organoid intelligence that was described in the new research.

“Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technology revolution but they are reaching a ceiling,” said Hartung, senior study author, in a statement. “Biocomputing is an enormous effort of compacting computational power and increasing its efficiency to push past our current technological limits.”

Artificial intelligence can be compared to the human brain in that it is inspired by thought processes. This gap is why humans can use an image or text-based CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, as an online security measure to prove they aren’t bots.

The Turing test, also known as the imitation game, was developed in 1950 by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing to assess how machines display intelligent behavior similar to that of a human.

“For example, AlphaGo (the AI that beat the world’s No. 1 Go player in 2017) was trained on data from 160,000 games,” Hartung said. “A person would have to play five hours a day for more than 175 years to experience these many games.”

Frontier: a human brain computer powered by a hundred million pounds of semiconductors and a terabytes of electrodes for electrode-based interface devices

On the other hand, a human brain is more energy efficient as well as better at learning and making complex logical decisions. Something as basic as being able to tell one animal from another is a task the human brain easily does that a computer cannot.

Frontier, a $600 million supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, weighs a hefty 8,000 pounds (3,629 kilograms), with each cabinet weighing the equivalent of two standard pickup trucks. The machine exceeded the computational capacity of a single human brain in June — but it used a million times more energy, Hartung said.

“Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500 (terabytes),” he added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we cannot pack more transistors into a tiny chip.”

Stem cell pioneers John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received a Nobel Prize in 2012 for developing a technique that allowed cells to be generated from fully developed tissues like skin. The brain organoids that Hartung and his team of researchers developed were used to study the effects of drugs on the brain.

“This opens up research on how the human brain works,” said Hartung, who is also the codirector of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Europe. You are able to manipulate the system, doing things that are out of line with human brains.

A brain-Computer interface device was developed and presented in an article last August, Hartung said. “It is a flexible shell that is densely covered with tiny electrodes that can both pick up signals from the organoid, and transmit signals to it.”

Hartung hopes one day there will be a beneficial communication channel between AI and OI “that would allow the two to explore each other’s capabilities.”

The cognitive aspects of neurological conditions could be studied with OI. “For example, we could compare memory formation in organoids derived from healthy people and from Alzheimer’s patients, and try to repair relative deficits. We could use OI to find out if certain things can cause memory or learning problems.

“We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism,” said study coauthor and co-investigator Lena Smirnova, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of environmental health and engineering, in a statement.

“The tools we are developing towards biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism, without having to use animals or to access patients, so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments,” she said.

This requires a thorough examination of the ethical implications of the technology. We must ensure that each step of the process is conducted with scientific integrity, while acknowledging that the larger issue is the potential impact on society. OI blurs the line between human and machine intelligence, and the technology and biology are moving at a rapid pace that can cause ethical and moral discussions to get in the way. This field needs to address ethical and moral issues before the technology crashes into the moral abyss, because of this type of scientific advancement.

The public is important in the understanding and development of organoid intelligence, according to a policy outlook by a professor from the University of Cape Town. The OI study was not involved in any way, shape or form by Kinderlerer.

Gary Miller, vice dean of research strategy and innovation, and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University in New York City, wrote about the issue in a Viewpoint article on Tuesday. Miller was not involved in the Johns Hopkins study.

While ChatGPT can efficiently collect information on the internet, it can’t react to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote.