A maybe less known fact about octopuses is that they have 9 brains, one central and another in each arm.
“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor. There are a lot of open questions about how these nodes in the nervous system are connected to each other,” said David Gire, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and Sivitilli’s advisor for the project.
Given the success of modeling artificial neural networks after biological ones, I wonder if the results of this research will inform future development of distributed artificial neural networks.
That’s not true at all. Deep learning struggles to learn even basic robotics tasks. Convolutional networks work well for image processing specifically because the network is structured in a way that’s effective for image processing. We don’t yet know how to structure and train neural networks for more advanced reasoning, not in a way that’s data efficient anyway.
“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor. There are a lot of open questions about how these nodes in the nervous system are connected to each other,” said David Gire, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and Sivitilli’s advisor for the project.
Given the success of modeling artificial neural networks after biological ones, I wonder if the results of this research will inform future development of distributed artificial neural networks.