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Ben Seymour, Hodgkin and Huxley’s legacy: the science of neural supercomputing, Brain, Volume 135, Issue 9, September 2012, Pages 2892–2895, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/aws184
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The small sub-tropical island of Okinawa, some 400 miles south of Japan, is home to a unique colony of creatures. About the size of large rabbits, they possess strange translucent heads into which a single eye is embedded. They spend most of their time foraging and mating and communicate with each other using a luminescent bulb located towards the small of their backs. Their predilection for reproduction has allowed their primitive genome to evolve rapidly to adapt to their unusual circumstances. For their food is a power supply to charge their battery packs, and mating involves infrared data transfer from their hard drives. They are cyber-rodents: mobile, autonomous robots confined only to their home in the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology by the doors of the laboratory.
There are two remarkable things about the cyber-rodents. First, they demonstrate that remarkably little computational power can sustain ‘awake’, behaving organisms. Their brain is a small four-CPU onboard computer, not a giant supercomputer as you might expect. Second, many algorithms used by the rodents are based on those thought to be implemented by live rats and indeed humans. These algorithms control basic behaviours of self-preservation, mimicking the functions thought to be controlled by neuromodulators such as serotonin and dopamine.
