Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

The internet part is cutesy[0], but it's by far the least interesting part of the article: of course you can send data via the internet.

Can we change the post's title to the actual title of the article: Memristive synapses connect brain and silicon spiking neurons?

[0] I really dislike it when people try to punch up their brain-computer interface papers by adding an "internet" component to it. Unless it's somehow latency-sensitive, the internet part adds nothing over local control and is just pure clickbait. Please don't do this. If I review your paper, I will point this out, loudly, to the editor.

View on HN

It is latency sensitive as the transmission protocol might substract from the usefullness. But this serves for future optimization. The title was not taken from the paper but from the nature article where the paper was initially cited.

It's bizarre though, because the latency problem is self-inflicted.

If you were going to build a brain-computer interface, why on earth would you scatter parts of it across three different countries like this? It's not exploiting a vast data center or anything, just a VLSI chip that happens to be far away. If you did have to do that, why wouldn't you directly connect all three centers instead of having a Python script(?) in the middle handing off information.

The membrane time constant of a biological neuron is also about 30 ms, which gives you a fair amount of wiggle room even in the face of lag.

Their solution seems clever, but other than a vague mention of "IoT brain implants" (please god, no), I don't see what problem it really solves.

I think there's value in measuring effectiveness of intelligence algorithms with different latencies.

Sure, but it makes a lot more sense to me to do that by intentionally delaying the input/output. You'd get a lot better control without depending on the whims of internet traffic.

> The membrane time constant of a biological neuron is also about 30 ms, which gives you a fair amount of wiggle room even in the face of lag.

Interesting. I had no idea it was that long. I figured it was on the order of 10s of ns.

Yup! It depends a bit on the cell type (and how it's measured) but they're definitely on the order of 10s of milliseconds. Here are some values mined from the literature: https://www.neuroelectro.org/ephys_prop/4/

Some very early work had estimated them as closer to 1 ms, but there were some technical problems with the measurement approach; I think that might account for some of the outliers there too.

Bear in mind that they're little bits of fat and water, so they're not going to be particularly fast. It's sort of amazing that the brain works at all!

[Also, no idea why your comment was dead, but vouched for it]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com