Genetic electronics

[mixed nuts]

...

"Dr. Adrian Thompson is a researcher operating from the Department of
Informatics at the University of Sussex, and his experimentation in the
mid-1990s represented some of science’s first practical attempts to
penetrate the virgin domain of hardware evolution. The concept is
roughly analogous to Charles Darwin’s elegant principle of natural
selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous
traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to
preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors’
descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful
traits.

Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine
whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for
improved microchip designs. As a test bed, he procured a special type of
chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) whose internal logic
can be completely rewritten as opposed to the fixed design of normal
chips. This flexibility results in a circuit whose operation is hot and
slow compared to conventional counterparts, but it allows a single chip
to become a modem, a voice-recognition unit, an audio processor, or just
about any other computer component. All one must do is load the
appropriate configuration."
...
Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into
its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was
utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of
them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five
individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest—
with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when
the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to
discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work
reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/


--
Grizzly H.

[§nühw¤Łf]

mixed nuts <melops...@undulatus.budgie> wrote in
news:nbanlk$108q$2...@gioia.aioe.org:

Evolution requires reproduction and an active force killing off the "less
adaptive" units. So deer are getting smarter. I watch them wait for
traffic now.

--
http://signon.org/sign/protect-americas-wolves
www.snuhwolf.9f.com|www.savewolves.org
_____ ____ ____ __ /\_/\ __ _ ______ _____
/ __/ |/ / / / / // // . . \\ \ |\ | / __ \ \ \ __\
_\ \/ / /_/ / _ / \ / \ \| \| \ \_\ \ \__\ _\
/___/_/|_/\____/_//_/ \_@_/ \__|\__|\____/\____\_\

[mimus99]

Hard to distinguish that from neural network programming:

Eg, evolution doesn't pre-pick a "perfect individual", and always leaves
varieties of individuals (a variety perfectly adapted to the present may be
borked in other places or later).

And you can write a computer program to rewrite itself easily enough (I did
that on the C64 thirty years ago, although no-one was interested in the
little paper involved), so that would be easier and more flexible than
fucking with FPGAs.

Still, he might come up with some interesting, perhaps more efficient,
variants on existing circuits.

--

At least he's not fucking with artificial nucleic acids,
Yet Another Disaster waiting to happen.

[Uncle Steve]

The exploitation of analog nonlinearities in arrays of digital logic
elements has probable implications for understanding the electro-
mechanics of brain function. There is a good chance that subtle
effects associated with secondary neural geometry and chemistry are
exploited to produce organized neural activity in much the same way.

TLDR: Brains are complex.



--
WARNING: possible impersonation attempt

[%]

Uncle Steve wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2016 at 04:24:25PM -0500, mimus99 wrote:
>> On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 20:16:39 -0500, mixed nuts wrote:
>>
>>> "Dr. Adrian Thompson is a researcher operating from the Department
>>> of Informatics at the University of Sussex, and his experimentation

>>> in the mid-1990s represented some of scienceâ?Ts first practical

>>> attempts to penetrate the virgin domain of hardware evolution. The
>>> concept is

>>> roughly analogous to Charles Darwinâ?Ts elegant principle of natural

>>> selection, which describes how individuals with the most
>>> advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This
>>> process tends to preserve favorable characteristics by passing them

>>> to the survivorsâ?T descendants, while simultaneously suppressing

>>> the spread of less-useful traits.
>>>
>>> Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine
>>> whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for
>>> improved microchip designs. As a test bed, he procured a special
>>> type of chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) whose
>>> internal logic can be completely rewritten as opposed to the fixed
>>> design of normal chips. This flexibility results in a circuit whose
>>> operation is hot and slow compared to conventional counterparts,
>>> but it allows a single chip to become a modem, a voice-recognition
>>> unit, an audio processor, or just about any other computer
>>> component. All one must do is load the appropriate configuration."
>>> ...
>>> Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight
>>> into
>>> its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip
>>> was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and
>>> most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback
>>> loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected

>>> from the restâ?" with no pathways that would allow them to
>>> influence the outputâ?" yet when the researcher disabled any one of

>>> them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones.
>>> Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was
>>> loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
>>>
>>> http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
>>
>> Hard to distinguish that from neural network programming:
>>
>> Eg, evolution doesn't pre-pick a "perfect individual", and always
>> leaves varieties of individuals (a variety perfectly adapted to the
>> present may be borked in other places or later).
>>
>> And you can write a computer program to rewrite itself easily enough
>> (I did that on the C64 thirty years ago, although no-one was
>> interested in the little paper involved), so that would be easier
>> and more flexible than fucking with FPGAs.
>>
>> Still, he might come up with some interesting, perhaps more
>> efficient, variants on existing circuits.
>
> The exploitation of analog nonlinearities in arrays of digital logic
> elements has probable implications for understanding the electro-
> mechanics of brain function. There is a good chance that subtle
> effects associated with secondary neural geometry and chemistry are
> exploited to produce organized neural activity in much the same way.
>
> TLDR: Brains are complex.

hi buddy

[mimus99]

Um. Waves of neuronal impulses looping around locally (the outer cortical
layer is thick enough and its neurons atopical enough that vertical looping
can be sustained), regionally (eg in the cortical senstory and motor areas)
and globally (especially through the thalamus, which is a central
switching-station if I've ever seen one) are probably the key to
understanding brain function.

The brain as electrical instrument is folly--the electrical impulses
exploited by EEG are by-products of neuronal axonal transmisssion, which is
decidedly not an electrical or electronic circuit.

--

Feh.

[Uncle Steve]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2016 at 04:45:07PM -0500, mimus99 wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Mar 2016 18:25:04 -0500, Uncle Steve wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Mar 04, 2016 at 04:24:25PM -0500, mimus99 wrote:
> >> On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 20:16:39 -0500, mixed nuts wrote:
> >>
> >>> "Dr. Adrian Thompson is a researcher operating from the Department of
> >>> Informatics at the University of Sussex, and his experimentation in the

> >>> mid-1990s represented some of science???s first practical attempts to

> >>> penetrate the virgin domain of hardware evolution. The concept is

> >>> roughly analogous to Charles Darwin???s elegant principle of natural

> >>> selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous
> >>> traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to

> >>> preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors???

> >>> descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful
> >>> traits.
> >>>
> >>> Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine
> >>> whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for
> >>> improved microchip designs. As a test bed, he procured a special type of
> >>> chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) whose internal logic
> >>> can be completely rewritten as opposed to the fixed design of normal
> >>> chips. This flexibility results in a circuit whose operation is hot and
> >>> slow compared to conventional counterparts, but it allows a single chip
> >>> to become a modem, a voice-recognition unit, an audio processor, or just
> >>> about any other computer component. All one must do is load the
> >>> appropriate configuration."
> >>> ...
> >>> Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into
> >>> its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was
> >>> utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of
> >>> them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five

> >>> individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest???
> >>> with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output??? yet when

I rather suspect the key is unraveling the layers, and there are
bound to be a whole whack of 'em. Gross physical morphology is
obviously determined by gene expression and hormonal gradients. Fine
structure is layered on top of that as a function of time through
post-natal development and throughout the organism's lifetime as per
experience. The morphology of fine structure is bound to have
considerable variation between organisms, which suggests that beyond a
set fuzzy limit the interpretation of brain signaling will be unique
to the individual. This implies that while it may be relatively
trivial to snoop on the auditory cortex to reproduce an incoming
signal, the interpretation of stored memory will be much, much harder.
Sensorimotor signaling may fit somewhere in the middle of those two
extremes, etc. Minsky's "Society of Mind" may be useful as a model of
brain-function hierarchy in this context, although he was primarily
concerned with behavior and action in that work, leaving autonomous
function largely aside, IIRC.

> The brain as electrical instrument is folly--the electrical impulses

> exploited by EEG are by-products of neuronal axonal transmission, which is

> decidedly not an electrical or electronic circuit.

That wasn't my point. I was thinking more of things like the effects
of local potential variation in the cell wall, localized
neurotransmitter gradients secondary to primary neuron function, and
so on. The importance of subtle neuron-axon time-series signaling
variations, in other words.

(A little more:) Brain cells have primary chemical and electrical
properties which in isolation (cell for cell) have primary modalities
(triggered, not triggered) which could be critically mediated by
secondary effects to produce circuits (whether electrical or chemical)
that are affected sufficiently by local non-linearities in an
/analogous/ fashion to the circuit described by Adrian Thompson in the
original research paper. I am not a neuroscientist, so I can only
hope I have not completely confused the matter with my temporizing.

That research, by the way, is several years old. It would be
interesting to find out how it has progressed. Would that I had
enough round tuits to investigate the subject fully.



--
When I use the word 'science' I do not mean to refer to the "let's
play God and go forth to commit crimes against humanity for fun and
profit" science which otherwise refers to itself as 'Christian
Science'. How others may use the term I cannot say.

[%]

hi buddy

[mimus99]

Since the system is self-organizing, more or less, during development
(another fruitful source of diversity and pathology), I wouldn't place too
much emphasis on fine-layering . . . .

> Gross physical morphology is
> obviously determined by gene expression and hormonal gradients. Fine
> structure is layered on top of that as a function of time through
> post-natal development and throughout the organism's lifetime as per
> experience. The morphology of fine structure is bound to have
> considerable variation between organisms, which suggests that beyond a
> set fuzzy limit the interpretation of brain signaling will be unique
> to the individual.

We're the only species that has the (mostly-) sensory and (mostly-) motor
areas of the cerebral cortex completely surrounded by associational areas,
Which Seems Pretty Suspicious To Me, and indeed I attribute our power of
choice (and the other animals' lessened but real powers of choice) to that
isolation.

> This implies that while it may be relatively
> trivial to snoop on the auditory cortex to reproduce an incoming
> signal, the interpretation of stored memory will be much, much harder.
> Sensorimotor signaling may fit somewhere in the middle of those two
> extremes, etc. Minsky's "Society of Mind" may be useful as a model of
> brain-function hierarchy in this context, although he was primarily
> concerned with behavior and action in that work, leaving autonomous
> function largely aside, IIRC.

There are a number of theories basically asserting competition or even
evolution to different (perhaps variable) centers of the brain.

>> The brain as electrical instrument is folly--the electrical impulses
>> exploited by EEG are by-products of neuronal axonal transmission, which is
>> decidedly not an electrical or electronic circuit.
>
> That wasn't my point. I was thinking more of things like the effects
> of local potential variation in the cell wall, localized
> neurotransmitter gradients secondary to primary neuron function, and
> so on. The importance of subtle neuron-axon time-series signaling
> variations, in other words.
>
> (A little more:) Brain cells have primary chemical and electrical
> properties which in isolation (cell for cell) have primary modalities
> (triggered, not triggered) which could be critically mediated by
> secondary effects to produce circuits (whether electrical or chemical)
> that are affected sufficiently by local non-linearities in an
> /analogous/ fashion to the circuit described by Adrian Thompson in the
> original research paper. I am not a neuroscientist, so I can only
> hope I have not completely confused the matter with my temporizing.

Where you got waves, you got imaginaries.

Also, many intermingled networks are isolated chemically, using different
neurotransmitters, making for still greater complexity.

> That research, by the way, is several years old. It would be
> interesting to find out how it has progressed. Would that I had
> enough round tuits to investigate the subject fully.

I'd like to see more work on animal dreaming-- thirty years ago it was
shown that all mammals, all birds, and, of the reptiles, the tortoises at
least, dream, as evidenced by simultaneous REM sleep and EEG
"spike-and-spindle" waveforms:

A capping evidence of animal personhood.

IIRC, frogs appeared to be asleep while they were awake and vice-versa,
EEG-wise: The philosopher Douglas Adams would've liked that.

--

At whatever phylogenetic point
the animal personhood cutoff may turn out to be,
I'd reserve judgment on cephalopods and wetas.

[Uncle Steve]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 04:38:18PM -0400, mimus99 wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:12:21 -0500, Uncle Steve wrote:

[Dr. Adrian Thompson]

I'm not sure what you mean by self-organizing. It seems to me that
distinct physical regions of the brain are wired to distinct skeletal
nervous system sections, and in addition various physical regions are
naturally linked by proximity in a hierarchy developed over the course
of our evolution from more primitive organisms. So, specialization of
a brain region such as the visual cortex co-evolved with contingent
sense organs. I'm not sure how much self-organizing there is within
the visual cortex, and there is bound to be some at least as the
'inputs' feed into it and where the data is massaged for the next
sequence in the chain of cogitation, but I suspect the majority of
coarse structure is determined by gene expression. Self organization
is probably limited to resolving the 'details' of the various
connections and interconnections. The morphology of coarse brain
structure within the visual cortex likely includes built-in feedback
mechanisms to direct any self-organization to specific ends.

Fine layering is a matter of determining the hierarchies of
'processing' elements (which are not necessarily discrete physical
blocks) to ultimately determine the end result of mammalian brain
development in the adult organism. There's no small amount of
complexity at work here, obviously. I'm not even sure it is
reasonable to speak about reducing brain structure into constituent
elements unless we can first identify what all those elements are.

> > Gross physical morphology is
> > obviously determined by gene expression and hormonal gradients. Fine
> > structure is layered on top of that as a function of time through
> > post-natal development and throughout the organism's lifetime as per
> > experience. The morphology of fine structure is bound to have
> > considerable variation between organisms, which suggests that beyond a
> > set fuzzy limit the interpretation of brain signaling will be unique
> > to the individual.
>
> We're the only species that has the (mostly-) sensory and (mostly-) motor
> areas of the cerebral cortex completely surrounded by associational areas,
> Which Seems Pretty Suspicious To Me, and indeed I attribute our power of
> choice (and the other animals' lessened but real powers of choice) to that
> isolation.

Hmm. My sister is a vet; perhaps I will ask her if she knows anything
about the morphological differences between various animals' brains.
But really, you have to wonder at the sheer size of an elephant's
brain in comparison to a humans' and wonder what goes on in all that
extra mass.

Of course. I wonder if it would be more or less difficult to reduce
brain structure if the whole thing were more like a computer CPU,
built largely on a homogenous network of bit-flipping elements.

> > That research, by the way, is several years old. It would be
> > interesting to find out how it has progressed. Would that I had
> > enough round tuits to investigate the subject fully.
>
> I'd like to see more work on animal dreaming-- thirty years ago it was
> shown that all mammals, all birds, and, of the reptiles, the tortoises at
> least, dream, as evidenced by simultaneous REM sleep and EEG
> "spike-and-spindle" waveforms:
>
> A capping evidence of animal personhood.
>
> IIRC, frogs appeared to be asleep while they were awake and vice-versa,
> EEG-wise: The philosopher Douglas Adams would've liked that.

I think people mostly overrate the importance of dreams and dreaming.
As much as the phenomenon of sleep has a direct linkage to the
diurnal cycle, and obviously a by-product of evolutionary adaptation
to the environment, dreams are clearly little more than an
unintentional side-effect. Let me whisper in your ear all night and I
guarantee that by the morning you'll regret letting me in your home.
Piss on sleep. It is a complete waste of time and should be cured as
a manufacturing defect.