Biological neural processors

September 11, 2003 on 3:42 pm | In Misc | Comments Off

Researchers Steven Potter (Georgia Tech) and Guy Ben-Ary (University of Western Australia, Perth) have created a robotic “arm” that makes a painter’s rudimentary brush strokes at Ben-Ary’s lab, directed over the Internet by its “brain” (composed of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish) in Potter’s lab, according to a July report from BBC News. According to Potter, the brain is not yet classically “intelligent” but does “adapt” (i.e., experience less chaos) and thus strokes more smoothly over time. [BBC News, 7- 28-03]

I find this unreal. The robotic arm controlled over the internet is nothing new. The fact that it is being controlled by a Petri dish with a lump of rat brain parts in lieu of a microprocessor is amazing.