AGI has finally been acheived in the form of Artificial Gerbil Intelligence. Thanks to Harvard and DeepMind creating a virtual rodent powered by AI to study how brains control movement.
As Science Daily puts it:
“The agility with which humans and animals move is an evolutionary marvel that no robot has yet been able to closely emulate. To help probe the mystery of how brains control movement, Harvard neuroscientists have created a virtual rat with an artificial brain that can move around just like a real rodent.
Bence Ölveczky, professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, led a group of researchers who collaborated with scientists at Google’s DeepMind AI lab to build a biomechanically realistic digital model of a rat. Using high-resolution data recorded from real rats, they trained an artificial neural network — the virtual rat’s ‘brain’ — to control the virtual body in a physics simulator called MuJoco, where gravity and other forces are present.
Publishing in Nature, the researchers found that activations in the virtual control network accurately predicted neural activity measured from the brains of real rats producing the same behaviors, said Ölveczky, who is an expert at training (real) rats to learn complex behaviors in order to study their neural circuitry. The feat represents a new approach to studying how the brain controls movement, Ölveczky said, by leveraging advances in deep reinforcement learning and AI, as well as 3D movement-tracking in freely behaving animals.”
Due to their similar biology rats have unfortunately become synonymous with lab work. Perhaps this can be the start of using virtual rodents to conduct testing so that we won’t have to use the use versions anymore.
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Is a Virtual Rodent the Greatest Idea Ever?
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