Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Signposts: Rat Cyborgs Outperform Rats, Computers

Following up on yesterday's "Royal Bank of Scotland is Axing 550 Jobs, Replacing Them With Robo-advisers".

From Ideas, Inventions, and Innovations:
Cyborg intelligence is an emerging kind of intelligence paradigm. It aims to deeply integrate machine intelligence with biological intelligence by connecting machines and living beings via neural interfaces, enhancing strength by combining the biological cognition capability with the machine computational capability.

Cyborg intelligence is considered to be a new way to augment living beings with machine intelligence says Chinese researchers Yipeng Yu, Gang Pan, Yongyue Gong, Kedi Xu, Nenggan Zheng, Weidong Hua, Xiaoxiang Zheng, and Zhaohui Wu
Credit: Penn State University
In a recent paper, the researchers describe how they created rat cyborgs to demonstrate how rats can expedite the maze escape task with integration of machine intelligence. They compared the performance of maze solving by computer, by individual rats, and by computer-aided rats (i.e. rat cyborgs). The rats had to find their way from a constant entrance to a constant exit in fourteen diverse mazes. 
Experimental system for maze solving.
Credit: PLoS ONE 
Performance of maze solving was measured by steps, coverage rates, and time spent. The experimental results with six rats and their intelligence-augmented rat cyborgs show that rat cyborgs have the best performance in escaping from mazes. These results provide a proof-of-principle demonstration for cyborg intelligence. In addition, their novel cyborg intelligent system (rat cyborg) has great potential in various applications, such as search and rescue in complex terrains....MORE