How Snails Could Make Robots Smarter
Marlene Breverman stashed this in Robot brains
With only two brain cells to rub together when making decisions, it would be fair to say that snails are not that smart. Nevertheless, their simple decision-making process—recently discovered by scientists—could be used to design more efficient robot “brains.”
Researchers from the University of Sussex found that complex decisions made by snails were achieved using just two cells; one that tells the snail whether it is hungry or not and the other lets it know if food is present.
http://www.newsweek.com/how-snails-could-make-robots-smarter-466937
Stashed in: Robots!, Awesome, Turing, Bots, AI, Snails!, Artificial Intelligence
Yet another experiment that suggests there may be something to the "grandmother cell" hypothesis after all, despite all the high-falootin' holographic talk of many neuroscientists about this issue.
I'm not familiar with the grandmother cell hypothesis. Simple controller model?
That's the idea, albeit the single cell for a concept/function could of course receive input from many other neurons. I seem to recall an experiment that seemed to point this way for human memory, in the past several years, even though the theory is out of vogue.
Makes a lot of sense to me do maybe the theory will come back.
2:01 PM Jun 06 2016