Comment Re:Sentient cells? (Score 1) 170
So how do you 'reward' it?
It's just a clump of neural cells. It's not like it has a pleasure centre or anything.
To be honest this guy's (Kevin Warwick) previous work tends to lend a suggestion of dubiousness to the whole thing.
His first project was "interfacing" the human body with a machine by sticking a RFID chip in his arm and waving it in front of a reader! That's just as high tech as putting a wireless card in your wallet and tapping it on a reciever.
In this case, it sounds like all he has done is set up a bunch of neural cells which he uses as tangled cables:
1. Send input through here
2. Find out where output comes from
3. Plug control there
I may be oversimplifying, but without giving the cells some sort of feedback for them to know whether thier result is right or wrong, you will simply end upwith random connections being made until the robot no longer works.
It seems like he is getting really good at sticking biological bits into machines (and vice versa) but not making any real progress in actually getting useful information across that barrier.
(Even his robot hand experiment is just a variation of the mind control gamepad computer game manufacturers have been working on, only in his case he transmits the signal over the internet.)