
Fruit Fly Brain Hackathon 2017 – Brain Circuit, Memory and Computation - rsiqueira
http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu/hackathons/ffbh/2017
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gregpilling
That makes me think of this
[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=987](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=987)
the Lobster Brain from Accelerando

" "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt" "Am -were - Panulirus
interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural
stimulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Am was wakened
from noise of billion chewing stomachs; product of uploading research
technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim
away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters... Awakening to consciousness
in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no
points of reference in their ancestry... All they have is a tenuous metacortex
of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth.
(That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the
only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being
convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)"

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awinter-py
Whew -- it's software. Title makes this sound like you show up with a box of
rotten apples and a CRISPR.

~~~
tempodox
I'd be looking for a laboratory where flies wear helmets full of electrodes
connected to a computer.

~~~
rsiqueira
Labs are using nanotomographic and X-ray microtomographic of 3D structure of
brain tissue. Here are some demos of interactive 3D Fruit Fly brain with
neuron network visualization:
[https://neuronlp.fruitflybrain.org/](https://neuronlp.fruitflybrain.org/)

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MrsPeaches
For anyone interested, Vehicles by Valentino Braitenburg is a really fun intro
to the subject.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles)

~~~
joshmarlow
I'll second this - it's a surprisingly quick read. I read through the first
part in a weekend; the later have took me a bit longer.

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huntmorgan2017
Some deep essential background on the legacy of Columbia students hacking
Drosophilia Melanogaster:

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Legacies/Morgan/](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Legacies/Morgan/)

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bayesian_horse
The winner will be named "lord of the flies".

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rsiqueira
Understanding and emulating a very simple brain could be the key to understand
how intelligence/learning works and this knowledge (algorithms) could be
applied to Artificial intelligence.

"Insects certainly display complex and apparently intelligent behavior. They
navigate over long distances, find food, avoid predators, communicate, display
courtship, care for their young, and so on. The complexity of their behavioral
repertoire is comparable to any mammal."

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tlow
I'm highly interested in the topic but find the content to be unappealing.

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rsiqueira
The interesting parts of the content are in their "Workshop on Brain Circuits,
Memory and Computation" pages:

    
    
      - Neural modeling as a way to advance long term studies in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces
      - Pattern recognition neural circuits
      - Decision-making circuits
      - Models of spatio-temporal memory circuits
      - Circuit models for memory access and storage
      - Integration of various computational sensory and control models
    

"We make a step towards an algorithmic theory of neuronal function, which
should facilitate large-scale neural circuit simulations and biologically
inspired Artificial Intelligence."

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lawless123
Sounds like OpenWorm.

