Comment by refibrillator
12 days ago
There are some neat videos and images in the repo: https://github.com/ccli3896/RLWorms
Basically they took a worm and hijacked the genetic machinery such that a subset of neurons could be activated or inhibited via a light sensitive protein.
Then they hooked up an unsupervised RL algorithm to a camera, and it learned how to control the lights to direct the worm towards a goal like food.
The learned algorithms were able to navigate obstacles and generally enhanced the capability of the worm while coexisting with the remaining uncontrolled neurons.
> unsupervised RL algorithm
I’m curious, is this an actual term? In machine learning you have three paradigms: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. I never heard of combining two of these terms in this way before.
It is a thing: https://masteringurlb.github.io/
The term is not used in this article, however.
> and it learned how to control the lights to direct the worm towards a goal like food.
Oh good. biobots..