Teaching Machines to Think Like Us

Can intelligence be taught to robots? Advances in physical reservoir computing, a technology that makes sense of brain signals, could contribute to creating artificial intelligence machines that think like us. In Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Tokyo outline how a robot could be taught to navigate through a maze by electrically stimulating a culture of brain nerve cells connected to the machine. These nerve cells, or neurons, were grown from living cells and acted as the physical reservoir for the computer to construct coherent signals. The signals are regarded as homeostatic signals, telling the robot the internal environment was being maintained within a certain range and acting as a baseline as it moved freely through the maze.