
Artificial and biological neurons communicate over the internet 2020 [pdf] - sturza
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58831-9.pdf
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mattkrause
The internet part is cutesy[0], but it's by far the least interesting part of
the article: of course you can send data via the internet.

Can we change the post's title to the actual title of the article: Memristive
synapses connect brain and silicon spiking neurons?

[0] I _really_ dislike it when people try to punch up their brain-computer
interface papers by adding an "internet" component to it. Unless it's somehow
latency-sensitive, the internet part adds nothing over local control and is
just pure clickbait. Please don't do this. If I review your paper, I will
point this out, loudly, to the editor.

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sturza
It is latency sensitive as the transmission protocol might substract from the
usefullness. But this serves for future optimization. The title was not taken
from the paper but from the nature article where the paper was initially
cited.

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mattkrause
It's bizarre though, because the latency problem is self-inflicted.

If you were going to build a brain-computer interface, why on earth would you
scatter parts of it across three different countries like this? It's not
exploiting a vast data center or anything, just a VLSI chip that happens to be
far away. If you did have to do that, why wouldn't you directly connect all
three centers instead of having a Python script(?) in the middle handing off
information.

The membrane time constant of a biological neuron is also about 30 ms, which
gives you a fair amount of wiggle room even in the face of lag.

Their solution seems clever, but other than a vague mention of "IoT brain
implants" (please god, no), I don't see what problem it really solves.

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inetknght
I think there's value in measuring effectiveness of intelligence algorithms
with different latencies.

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mattkrause
Sure, but it makes a lot more sense to me to do that by intentionally delaying
the input/output. You'd get a lot better control without depending on the
whims of internet traffic.

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toxik
This article does not mention the Internet once. The actual paper title is:

Memristive synapses connect brain and silicon spiking neurons

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sturza
It’s mentioned a couple of times. Here’s one: Secondly, the experiment shows
successful synaptor operation over the internet and not only by wire
connection.

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toxik
You're right, I scrolled through and then did a word search. Must've made a
typo. Anyhow, the title is not what the submission title is.

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Tenoke
I've been waiting for progress in this direction for a while, and this paper
seems to follow naturally from what many were expecting.

I'm more excited about adding more neuroplasticity, brainpower, and easier
interfacing to humans, but if you can also make it so I can train NNs on rat
brainware I'll be pretty happy, too. This further opens the path to both.

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est31
Important quote:

> Achieving this [communication over the Internet] is not trivial, since
> issues such as handling UDP propagation delays (which are typically variable
> and thus difficult to control) need to be resolved.

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yayr
What are good ressources / frameworks to simulate spiking neural nets on
regular computing hardware?

How would a backpropagation work in such an architecture?

~~~
haffi112
Here is one simulator you can use:
[https://briansimulator.org/](https://briansimulator.org/)

Generally it is not known to my best knowledge how or whether the brain uses
backpropagation (knowing that would be a huge result). However, several papers
have been written on that topic with varying approaches. I encourage you to do
a literature search if you want to dig deeper.

On this topic it is worth mentioning that it is not even known why the brain
uses discrete signals (spikes) for communication.

