
Abstract visualization of biological neural network - sethbannon
http://nxxcxx.github.io/Neural-Network/
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coderzach
Really Impressive. I wonder if you could use this to visualize a neural net
that's solving actual problems.

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sabalaba
This doesn't look like a neural network that's solving any actual problems
beyond visualizing firing patterns. Most ANNs don't have any concept of time
built into the model. When you're in feed-forward mode, the underlying
computation is simply a bunch of dot products.

However, you might be able to make some cool visualizations if your ANN was a
Spiking Neural Network.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiking_neural_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiking_neural_network)

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nightski
Well it's thresholded so you could visualize the "activated" neurons in a
manner such as this.

Would it be useful though? Maybe. Probably not as the fact that a neuron fires
isn't nearly as useful as why it fired (what it represents).

But I like that you mention time. It always seemed odd that NN's today
completely ignore that aspect. Sure whether a neuron fires is binary. But the
accumulation of spikes is not binary and highly temporal. yet we completely
ignore this aspect.

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wuliwong
I'm confused by you guys saying NN's today completely ignore time? If I have a
network of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons and I integrate the equations, I'm
integrating over time. I'm not sure how that is ignoring it? Disclaimer: it
has been about 4 years since I've written any code to integrate H-H neurons,
so I might be forgetting something really obvious. :) But I can't imagine
EVERYONE is ignoring time when they simulate networks of neurons.

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delluminatus
They are talking about NNs used in machine learning, which are atemporal,
unlike H-H or other models of human cognition.

In a machine learning neural network there is no integration; they are
basically just nonlinear data transformations that can (usually...) be
trained.

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mindbound
Is it based on an actual model of neural activity (Izhikevich, H-H, etc.) or
is it an abstract visualisation in the sense that it just looks like neurons
firing?

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mindbound
OK, it's the latter. Pretty pictures, moving on.

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wuliwong
There is a serious amount of heavy lifting in the visualization department
done here for us. I imagine forking this repo and adding a simple model to
govern the neuron and axon behavior would be doable. Writing this off as
"pretty pictures" is a little over-the-top. Seems like a significant amount of
work went into producing these real-time visualizations.

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jberryman
Shameless plug for a little visualization I made some time ago of a neural
network in a developing fruit fly, which performs an interesting probabilistic
algorithm to elect a maximal independent set [http://jberryman.github.io/fly-
mis/](http://jberryman.github.io/fly-mis/)

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sethbannon
Be sure to zoom in!

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nostromo
Good tip! Also left click and drag to rotate. Right click and drag to pan.

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gecko39
Very cool, what's the backstory? Just a fun side project?

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mentos
Is a neural network all that you would need to model in order to simulate a
human's thoughts?

How far are we from mapping a real brain to a simulation like this and hitting
play?

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Retric
It somewhat depends on what you think of as a neural network. For simple
models no, state is vary important, as is signaling delays, hormones, and
blood flow etc. Which means each neuron would individual be far more complex
than what is generally used in computer science. Further brains are far from
random so you would need to either copy someone or simulate the various
developmental stages a person goes though. Finally, a neural network is
pointless without some output so for anything beyond pretty pictures you need
some sensory input's and some way to handle outputs.

However, I have seen estimates that somewhere around a yottahert class
computer working for a few years might be capable of simulating a brain
sufficiently complex to hold an arbitrary conversation. Building the software
capable of running such a simulation is another story.

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rnl
This looks absolutely stunning. I wish I could train the brain by myself and
see how it operates in as an artificial neural network. Anyway, great job!

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george_ciobanu
This is awesome!
[http://imgur.com/t/science/0eZe3RK](http://imgur.com/t/science/0eZe3RK)

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mattaereal
Can someone tell me anything about this project? I'm curious.

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Kaihuang724
Wow this is amazing. Great work.

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Ancient
Everyone complaining or fussing about how primitive this model is on a
browser, ya'll need to chill out and stop taking beautiful work like this for
granted. Some of you may say this is easy to do or why didn't he also "do
this" or "do that" \- how about you help out and make it better ;)

@sethbannon Thanks for the visuals and hard work!

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wuliwong
I agree, a really cool project which I would imagine could be extended to a
"real" model without a ton of work. I imagine the amount of work to fork a
javascript library which integrated a network of H-H model neurons to make it
output this type of visualization would be far more work than adding the H-H
piece to this code. I could be wrong but at first blush, that's how I see it.

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delluminatus
I think it would be quite a bit of work to integrate the H-H model or any
model of a biological brain with this visualization.

This is because the visualization is basically just a graph, with axons as
edges and neurons as nodes, and then signals are propagated with extremely
simple graph-traversal style logic. On the other hand, the H-H model tries to
deal with the physical reality of the human brain so it is much more
complicated and relies on some data (like axon width) that simply doesn't
exist here.

It would be possible and potentially interesting, for sure, but probably more
work than you might think.

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tantalor
I like the other title better, "Abstract visualization of biological neural
network"

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nathancahill
Or at least "Biological Neural Network Simulation in JS"

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bearzoo
oh the power of buzzwords

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gadjo95
Is it based on anything or just some random connection and nice visualization
(which then isn't really impressive)

