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“Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet.”

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Z
Zachary Pincus
Edited

ehhhh... nothing is really being "learned" or "classified" by the organoids here. Basically, they sent electrical patterns (patterned across space I think?) into a clump of cells, and then looked to see if different input patterns produced different patterns of activation of the neurons. Then they (with regular machine learning) asked if those output patterns could be used to classify the input patterns back to the braille letters.

Maybe I'm missing something but I'd be surprised if this didn't work with muscle cells or similar too. They're just asking if cells can pick up a stimulus and do something with it, which is... not surprising.

E
elemental

um, remind me please, why do we want this?

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