Bioengineers from Indiana University in the US have combined lab-grown human brain tissue with microelectrodes. The scientists called their creation Brainoware. The biocomputer is in its early stages of development, but can already perform complex tasks such as voice recognition. Lead researcher Dr Feng Guo hopes his lighter-than-usual software will help advance artificial intelligence technology. This could also mean that AI hardware uses much less power than using silicon chips alone.
The scientists said their Brainoware system uses “organoids” – artificially grown bundles of tissue and stem cells that resemble an organ. Dr. Guo said his team’s organoids are like mini-brains. They transformed and developed neurons similar to those found in the human brain.
The researchers say their next step will be to explore how Brainoware can be adapted to perform higher-level tasks. This technology could one day be used to create improved brain models and advance neuroscience research or treatments for neurological diseases. At the moment, one of the main challenges for researchers is to find a solution to how to keep the created tissue alive.
The team hooked up computer equipment to send electrical stimulation to the organoid and read the neural activity it produced in response. The system recognized Japanese vowel sounds and predicted a mathematical map. In a language test, scientists tasked Brainoware to distinguish between eight different men speaking Japanese. In a math test, the researchers tried to get the system to predict an Oenon map representing chaotic activity. Here, Brainoware was slightly less accurate than silicon-based neural networks, but its training time was more than 90 percent faster.
Early biocomputers were proposed to be created based on DNA and bacteria. For example, in 2001, Shapiro managed to implement the model in a real biocomputer, which consisted of DNA, RNA molecules and special enzymes. Enzyme molecules acted as hardware, and DNA molecules acted as software. At the same time, about a trillion elementary computing modules were placed in one test tube.
As a result, the calculation speed could reach a billion operations per second, and the accuracy was 99.8%. This biocomputer can only be used to solve the simplest problems, giving only two types of answers: “true” or “false”. In the experiments performed, in one cycle, all DNA molecules solved a single problem in parallel. However, they can potentially work on different tasks simultaneously, while traditional PCs are essentially single-tasking.
In 2001, American scientists created transgenic microorganisms (that is, microorganisms with artificially altered genes), whose cells can perform logical operations AND and OR. Specialists from the Oak Ridge Laboratory, Tennessee, used the ability of genes to synthesize a particular protein under the influence of a certain group of chemical stimuli. Scientists have altered the genetic code of the bacteria Pseudomonas putida so that its cells gain the ability to perform simple logical operations. For example, when performing the AND operation, two substances (essentially input operands) are supplied to the cell, under the influence of which the gene produces a specific protein.
Compared to conventional computing devices, biocomputers have a number of unique features: they use ternary rather than binary code (since the information in them is encoded by triplets of nucleotides), DNA-based computing devices store data with a density trillions of times greater than that of optical disks, DNA- computers have exceptionally low power consumption.