AI Could Get Smarter By Copying the Neural Structure of a Rat Brain (ieee.org) 89
the_newsbeagle writes: Many of today's fanciest artificial intelligence systems are some type of artificial neural network, but they bear only the roughest resemblance to a biological brain's real networks of neurons. That could change thanks to a $100M program from IARPA. The intelligence agency is funding neuroscience teams to map 1 cubic millimeter of rodent brain, looking at activity in the visual cortex while the rodent is engaged in a complex visual recognition task. By discovering how the neural circuits in that brain cube get activated to process information, IARPA hopes to find inspiration for better artificial neural networks. And an AI that performs better on visual recognition tasks could certainly be useful to intelligence agencies.
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AI Could Get Smarter By Copying the Neural Structure of a Rat Brain
So could Trump. Why not put that bloated military budget to good use and invest in our POTUS? Heck, if we could bump his IQ by an extra 80 points he might even reconsider supporting the Paris agreement.
Sorry but a president with just an iq of 80 won't help either.
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Just because a politician doesn't espouse policies you support doesn't make him stupid, nor you smart.
If anything, it shows you're close-minded and not as smart as you believe you are - you can't even conceive the notion that you just might be wrong.
I assume you are one of the working class that neither party represents, or a traditional republican. I'm sorry there was no viable candidate for you vote on in the election, but only an uninformed idiot would think trump is representing your interests. He is a RINO, is massively cutting popular republican programs like Medicare against his promises (not making it better), kicking 20 million off insurance including elderly republicans, massively gutting the regulations protecting everyday people, and giv
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As I recall, the bill in its original form contained much sensible features such as a public option for all which would count as the 'medicare expansion' that you just blasted Trump for not doing though he promised he would. It was republicans who opposed Obamacare at every turn that caused the law to be so disfugured from its original form (pretty much a Romn [wikipedia.org]
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My bad. I did not remember that they had the ability to evade a filibuster. Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes, I sit corrected on this. It is their fault.
That being said, the Republican "plans" for fixing Obamacare have thus far seemed like a bunch of clueless idiots trying to extinguish a fire by pouring oil on it.
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The Democrats had the White House, the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate.
Obamacare's failures are entirely on Democrats.
That is not true. Ted Kennedy's death and following special election win by a Republican ended the filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate before a revised bill could be voted on. This left only an early draft to be voted on, with many flaws but a Republican party who was more interested in creating a Democrat failure than in improving health care. Considering the imperfect Obamacare Bill had many significant improvements (as evidenced by how hard it has been to get enough Republican support to repeal
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My whole point is there wasn't a sane choice on either side (sure as hell wouldn't vote for Hillary), and the two party system is currently screwing the working class. Instead of only voting for the RNC or DNC candidate, vote for who you actual
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I was never really a party line liberal, and don't blame Obama 100% for the ACA failures - he was far to conciliatory and compromised too much. Overall I didn't like Obama and am now more of an independent voter despite my family earning in the top 5% every year. My whole point is there wasn't a sane choice on either side (sure as hell wouldn't vote for Hillary), and the two party system is currently screwing the working class. Instead of only voting for the RNC or DNC candidate, vote for who you actually want like I did. If enough people do this maybe both parties will pull their heads outta their behinds.
I'm sure that was entirely satisfying, but that didn't do that much good. After all, we have a ban on refugees that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with appeasing the demographic anxieties of illiterati. Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who risked their neck for us are now facing deportation or disown past promises for legal entry. We are rolling back EPA. And so on and so on.
Hillary is putrid. She's waaay deep, embedded in the establishment. But crooked as it she was, Hillary wouldn't h
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Funny how I hear that "this isn't the time" every god damned fucking election and I'll bet I continue to hear it throughout the remainder of my life.
No! YOU ARE PERSONALLY responsible dilweed. People like you always force the issue, then look shocked. Simply shocked when it doesn't pan out.
Every single one of you that I know have always ultimately expressed regret over how things turned out but are absolutely never in favor of even making an attempt to change things. It's always which evil isn't as bad as the other evils. Not which is the best option. You guys are ALWAYS ready to sell off the next half of the light of the world to "save" the remainder. Never mind that by the time you guys are through were now down to like 0.00002% of the light of the world. Next election, it will be the same. Then it will be 0.00001% of the light of the world. But hey! Still not your fault even though you sell off half every damn time!
Say what you want. There was only one alternative to stop the Muslim ban. One.
You either tried to use your vote to stop it, or you used it to "try change things." Again, this type of thinking only comes from people who are not going to be significantly affected by The Great Orange One's bigoted policies.
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Sorry, but that isn't an argument for stupid, that's an argument for evil. Now having your casino go bankrupt, that's an argument for stupid, at least on the surface. Perhaps there was some hidden way in which it benefited him, so it's only another argument for evil, but on the surface it looks like an argument for stupid.
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Just because a politician doesn't espouse policies you support doesn't make him stupid, nor you smart.
If anything, it shows you're close-minded and not as smart as you believe you are - you can't even conceive the notion that you just might be wrong.
Fact isn't a policy you neanderthal. You are confusing reality with active choices, such as religion or snorting cocaine. Like with evolution (also a fact), the details of how we affect our climate are well understood, and those details are described in abundance, readily available for anyone that wishes to understand them. The comprehensive model for our climate is still very turbulent, as with most complex systems we try to understand.
Choosing a policy is what happens later, when you have the facts. The p
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The plural of "Sitzpinkler" is also "Sitzpinkler" and a German noun always starts with a capital letter.
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Fact isn't a policy you neanderthal. ...
Here, folks, you can see displayed the close-minded, arrogant viciousness of the standard Leftist.
While I agree TimothyHollins used unnecessarily inflammatory language in his comment, the content of his post was dead on about the difference between attacking policies and attacking incorrect beliefs behind those policies. Attacking incorrect beliefs does not make you close minded.
What most people (on both the left and right) see others with stupid beliefs they assume the holders of those beliefs are also stupid, and that is often not the case. Not every climate change or evolution denier is stupid, even
Re: Grow the fuck up already (Score:1)
Ok so... (Score:2)
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Who would run cat5 into the dark places for us if not our friends the rats?
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Is this a reference to CIA, NSA and the other secret services?
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They're all dirty rats! ;-)
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an AI that takes in garbage,
. . . Facebook readers . . .
hides in the darkest cramped spaces,
. . . We call them collaborative cubicles . . .
efficiently distributes viruses,
. . . Emails from your friends . . .
and is a plague to humankind?
Ah, yes, humans' leading cause of death . . . other humans.
Yep, rat-brained AI really would fit well in as a human brain.
"Data indicates that I ... err ... AI could ... (Score:2)
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Idiot. Population decrease is strongly correlated with access to television. Cancer generally doesn't happen at a young enough age to affect population. (The study about TV and population growth dates back to the 1950's or '60's. I suspect that internet access might show the same correlation, but I've never seen a study testing the hypothesis.)
Start with primitive C Elegans Worm (Score:5, Interesting)
C Elegans is am extensively studied nematode with exactly 302 neurons, whose contetome (wiring) is consistent and known.
But how its brain actually works remains a mystery. Neurons are complex, as is their interactions with the input and output.
Not much point looking at mice with many orders of magnitude more first.
Personally, I do not think that mapping neurons in detail will lead to AI. But if you are going to do it, start with something vaguely tractable. C Elegans.
Re:Start with primitive C Elegans Worm (Score:4, Informative)
Why not both, by different research teams ? There may be things that we can see in 50,000 neurons of a rat brain that we can't see in the 300 neurons of C.elegans.
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Too many, probably, because lacking the capability to understand how do simpler systems of biological neurons work, it's going to be really hard to make any sense out of what we see.
At least with the rat, we can correlate the things we see in the brain with the images that we are presenting. Also, we don't need to understand everything we see in the brain. If we find a couple of new things, we can try them out in artificial neural nets, and see if they result in improved performance.
AI Path finding (Score:2)
Teach AI the path finding skills of a common ant. Then get back to me on mastering rat brains.
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They aren't planning to "master" rat brains. They are simply trying to learn from them, specifically for their vision system. While the path finding skills of an ant may be interesting, they aren't particularly useful to a robot with a GPS sensor and a map.
And why should they come back to you, what have you done ?
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It was only recently that researchers discovered how much computation is performed by dendrites, and only this year that they discovered there is 10x more electrical activity by magnitude going on in the dendrites compared to the neuron firing, and multiple modes of activity (firing/digital as well as gradient/analog).
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I can understand your point, but also the gp's. Probably they should work with starfish and oysters before they devote too much study to rats. But rats are easier to raise in a lab, and come in genetically standardized strains. And there *is* a lot of pre-existing work on rat brains.
Re:Start with primitive C Elegans Worm (Score:4, Interesting)
Like Open Worm [openworm.org]?
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That seems like it might be a good point, but it's not really. After studying C Elegans, we've started to realize that it too simple and more evolved to the point where individual neurons are specialized...the magic is not in the network any more.
By studying mammalian neocortex at this scale for the first time, both structurally (how are things wired) and functionally (how do things fire) we can begin to understand learning rules and data representations used in the brain to help constrain possible algorith
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Ratsistance is futile. (Score:2)
Adding rat brains can make AI smarter, huh?
I guess that explains why the Borg kept wanting to assimilate humans.
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Working out how real brains store information and learn new behaviours can definitely take neural networks far beyond the hand-concocted learning algorithms we currently use. Basically you point deep learning systems at the brain data and let that work out your learning algorithms for you, to make NNs that learn in whole new ways, which mean they can be used for entirely new classes of problems.
The trouble with the rat race (Score:3)
IBM Blue Brain Project (Score:2)
Is this some kind of way to pump money into IBM's Blue Brain Project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )? As I remember, that project was trying to build a rat's neocortical column and was headed by Henry Markram and was funded by Swiss govt.
No Cheese (Score:2)
In the server room!!!
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Out of cheese error. Reboot from start.
We've been wrong all along (Score:3)
On our way to human synthetic brains? (Score:3)
http://www.kurzweilai.net/robo... [kurzweilai.net]
http://www.pnas.org/content/11... [pnas.org]
First insects, now rodents? Maybe dogs, then dolphins, then humans?
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*high five!*
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First insects, now rodents? Maybe dogs, then dolphins, then humans?
Maybe, but not in the lifetime of anybody currently alive.
Rats? uh oh (Score:2)
Ratbrain Terminators (Score:2)
Don't worry about the Trat1000. They are easy to trick. You lure them into a trap with peanut butter.
Here's $100M. Don't mind the starving. (Score:2)
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Remember Igor... (Score:2)
I knew it... (Score:2)
Killer drones guided by mutant rat brains. It's only a matter of time.
So when applied (Score:1)
Or Maybe Not? (Score:2)
There's nothing extraordinary about rats vis-a-vis humans. And its _human_ intelliigence we want to model, not rat intelligence, last time I checked!
We don't need any Artificial Rats, though my cat might enjoy one.
Obligatory Slashdot meme... (Score:1)