alt Hacker NewsIt’s the first time I’ve heard about this company, and of course I haven’t taken the time to check how real their product is, but honestly, for me it’s very difficult to believe we currently have the technology to correctly integrate a living neuron into a chip, let alone compute anything meaningful with it.
From what I’ve read elsewhere, our understanding of neurons is still very basic, and we need a lot more fundamental research before reaching results like these. We still don’t even properly know how migraines work, nor can we cure paraplegia, yet somehow we supposedly have the capacity to grow second brains and program them on top of that.
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I haven’t looked into it deeply either.
To my knowledge, we understand how an individual neuron works quite well. We just don’t really understand macro effects in large networks of neurons.
The video seems buzz wordy. Without looking into this too deeply, it seems like they’re using neurons individually or in small groups rather than creating a true “brain”. I would guess they’re using neurons or small groups of them sort of like transistors that do a single basic thing rather than a full “brain” that they just feed images to.
From their video it just comes across as they stimulate different left/right neurons depending on where the enemy is on screen and then listen to some output that also says left/right. Shooting looks completely random, to be frank.
If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.
It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game other than "left input means left output", which is a rather trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong example.
They don't say anything on how much training is required for this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all. The learning part is "next".
You don't need to understand how neurons work in detail to be able to use them to do something. In the past, we were able to use electricity for various purposes without knowing about electrons.