using rat brains to fly planes

this is pretty amazing:

The “brain”, grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

link via slashdot


6 Responses to “using rat brains to fly planes”  

  1. 1 Will

    I saw that too… o.O

  2. 2 engleweed

    big deal - anyone can fly now with GPS

  3. 3 Anonymous

    saw that one too. i want one. and, id like to wire up a neural net to it’s visual tectum (1st stop of optic nerve) and use it to decode to usable video. one net begats another. regardless. i totally want a mouse/rat cam. especially if its flying a jet.

  4. 4 Anonymous

    and whoa. slick message…leaving….thingy.

  5. 5 Anonymous

    holy crap. totally doing that again. whheee!

  6. 6 Anonymous

    just occured to me… 25k neural cells is a lot of processing power….that allows for….um… something in the vicinty of millions of connections, and of varying strength, neuronal circuts, and it can rewire/reroute on the fly. I think the figures for humans were billions of neurons and trillions of connections. I wonder a)how that compares to computer hardware (on an instructions/operations per second basis…) and b)if it could be taught to do various equations… nothing like bio-processing to trun things upside down…

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