Sci-NOT-fi

"Mr Warwick’s team at Reading has now gone a stage further. Instead of using a computer model of part of the brain as a controller, the group’s new “animat” (part animal, part material) relies solely on nerve cells from an actual brain.

"Signals from a culture of rodent brain cells in a tiny dish are picked up by an array of electrodes and used to drive a robot’s wheels. The animat’s biological brain learns how and when to steer away from obstacles by interpreting sensory data fed to it by the robot’s sonar array. And it does this without outside help or an electronic computer to crunch the data."

HOLY CRAP.

This thing below I don't even fully understand, but what's creepy is that it seems no one else does either.

"The evolvable concept, pioneered by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in Britain, has led to some astonishing results. Dr Thompson’s original “proof of principle” experiment—a design for a simple analogue circuit that could tell the difference between two audio tones—worked brilliantly, but to this day no one knows quite why. Left to run for some 4,000 iterations on its own, the genetic algorithm somehow found ways of exploiting physical quirks in the semiconductor material that researchers still don’t fully comprehend."

(Thanks, as always and forever, to The Economist for the tip-off...and the scare.)




(Kudos for this image and for further info go here.)