Thinkless Machines

I read all kinds of stuff about Apple's hardware, software, iPhones, iPods, iWhatevers. I am not really against Apple, really, but I don't own any of those things.

I know lots of people with iPods, etc., such as my daughter and most of her friends. Her husband evidently ran over one with his car recently -- I found the flattened, broken thin glass and metal thing in a compartment in his truck when I was looking for a rolling marble or something. Whatever it cost, it is worthless now.

I have many computers, including old, 1999 obsolete Thinkpad, newer medium quality Dell laptop, a higher end Alienware desktop, plus a lesser, older Dell desktop about 5 years old. I use all of them for various purposes -- sort of software quality filters. If something will still run decently on the Thinkpad (with Linux) it will run extremely good on the Alienware box (with any OS...)

But, back to the Apples. Why don't I have an Apple? Actually my first "home" computer was an Apple, although I had played with TTL circuitry and made weird little contraptions -- sort of proto-computers -- before I plopped down the $2500 bucks for an Apple IIe. Now, that was a SLOW computer.

Later on, due to my profession in software, I had access to very powerful machines -- servers, workstations, robotic systems, etc. -- and didn't really have time to screw around with gutless machines. So I needed whatever the latest greatest fastest stuff was -- usually an Intel box, but sometimes it was SGI or even an IBM system of some kind. Apple was not on the list.

I did play with a NeXT box for a while, something that was for porting software to, but it wasn't a very popular system for whatever reason, cost or lack of color or something. I thought it was OK, and certainly I liked the C and C++ programming for it. But it was just a brief project, and on to the next junk.

I have never used a Mac, especially an iMac or whatever they have, either the desktop or the laptop or the iPod or iPhone or anything else. I guess the closest I've come is having used Safari web browser for a few days, and occasionally using iTunes for playing mp3s (but not syncing to an iPod or using the iStore...)

And now that I'm getting on in years, I probably won't ever purposely buy anything from Apple. If somebody buys me one as a gift or as a work project or something, I guess I wouldn't kick it off the desk. But I'm not rushing out to empty my wallet on one anytime soon.

For one thing, for absolutely FREE, I can use a myriad instances of Linux (I know, I know -- Apple-heads look down on Linux). Yet, for all practical purposes, except for the prices of machines and the software, Linux is very similar to Apple's stuff. Not identical, no. Nor is it identical to Microsoft, nor is Linux even identical to Linux, since there are so many flavors.

But I am a machine head -- I like the fact that I can mold Linux any which way I want, or not, on a whim. I don't have Cupertino's lawyers breathing down my neck, nor the ghost of Bill Gates haunting me. I just have nice systems running in all my machines.

I also have Microsoft, of course. I have to because I'm a software guy. But I use that the way I'd use a semi-truck - to haul cargo. I use Linux the way I'd use space craft -- to do whatever the heck I feel like doing. I'm using Ubuntu Linux on my Alienware to write this, but I could just have well done it with the Thinkpad, although a bit slower.

Apple? I'm not sure I even know what to think about those things. I hardly ever think about it them at all. And I for sure will never pay actual money for one, ever again. I paid way, way to much for that Apple IIe, and it couldn't even think one bit.

Another Life Emerges From The Goop

There is a war going on between humans, and since it involves a subject so profoundly bound with our existence and our place within the Universe, naturally there will be heated disagreement and even deaths resulting. You guessed it -- religion and philosophy cause wars.

First of all, even without a discussion about the nature of life, or even the nature of the non-biological processes all around us, there are many arguments over whose "holy book" is the holiest. It seems to always depend on where you were born, and therefore which culture had its effects imprinted on you first. I don't like arguing about things that are essentially arbitrary. In fact I don't like arguing at all. It is quite tiresome, and I have little of my life remaining to waste on such endless blithering.

I am not an Atheist, although I don't necessarily disagree with many of their arguments. Yet I am definitely not a Theist, because both of those labels imply that I believe something. I don't believe in either premise -- that there is NO god, or that there IS a god. Who knows?

I don't "believe" anything on that level. There are many things that I suspect, and there are many things that seem to be true -- the fact that I am alive right now, typing these words into a computer -- how can I argue against such a fact. I can't. But that is not something that requires "belief". I don't have to actively force my brain to believe in such an immediate reality. I just exist, whether I believe it or not.

"Belief" is something that is required whenever there is a possible doubt. And for scientists, the doubt must be overcome with logical facts which can be proven (or at least not collide against things which are already proven.) I am more like a scientist in that regard. The other kind of belief is "Faith", in which one believes something for the sake of believing it, regardless of any facts, for or against. I have no "faith".

I used to joke about believing things, such as "I will now believe in Aliens." I certainly had no reason or knowledge regarding Aliens that could prompt such a decision. It was just an arbitrary thing to believe -- something which many people have strong feelings about. I just liked to see how people would react to such a statement. It is silly, yet no more silly than believing in the Big Bang or something like that.

However, when I look at the most fundamental aspects of existence, such as the substrate of atomic interactions known as chemistry, with all the electrons and atomic weights somehow producing a vast array of properties in so many different combinations -- I see an endless complexity. It is not necessary to drag "life chemistry" into the problem in order to see the complexity. It exists in the simplest chemical, e.g. hydrogen. The existence of hydrogen is a mystery all in its own. The relationship of the single proton with its single electron has a built in unpredictability, and behaviors which depend greatly upon the temperature of the environment (and thus of other hydrogen or other atoms) around it.

Looking even closer, one finds that a proton is collection of quarks, with different properties within, thereby making the hydrogen atom far more complicated than a stone with a littler stone orbiting it. Even an electron, so tiny compared to the proton, is a lepton particle/wave contraption with little rules of its own within. It also depends on the temperature of the environment to behave whichever way it does.

When we back out to the level of human life, and pick up a stone from the ground, we don't see the vast interactions of countless specks of atoms and their electrons. We just feel the weight, the hardness, the solidness of the stone in our hand. If we could live a billion years, and held the rock in our hands the entire time, it would have changed very little. Possibly the acids in our skin might effect it, or bacteria, gasses and so forth in the environment might discolor the thing, but it would mostly just be that same old stone.

Yet, internally, the atoms may have all changed places in their matrices, and certainly the electrons would have all been replaced. If one could watch atoms through a microscope, which is rarely possible, there would be an endless dance of molecules, vibrating, bouncing about, changing partners as in a minuet. Yet, seen from the distance of our eyes to our hands, the stone's atoms seem to be as completely solid as solids can possibly be.

Still, if you could make a tiny drill with a drill bit as sharp as a single atom of titanium, and drill the tiniest possible hole into that matrix of atoms, the hole would disappear nearly instantly once the drill bit was removed. Atoms won't tolerate such an artificial structure as a hole without some other factor, such as a minimum size for the hole, or a junction layer of differing atoms that hold back the tide of other atoms from filling in the hole. Yet, even the junction layer would have rules governing the minimum size of a hole that it could tolerate.

So, are these atoms alive? Are they like teeny tiny bacteria or viruses? I doubt that they alive in the sense that formal life forms are alive. Certainly they are not organic molecules, at least not in a common stone -- perhaps made only from silicon dioxide, quartz, or feldspar, without a single carbon atom to be seen in the whole matrix (except possibly as an impurity.)

But, even if the rock was merely a solid crystal of hydrogen (not very likely on the Earth), it would have extremely unpredictable behavior at the molecular level. The only thing that can be predicted is that it will be chaotic. This is the law of entropy. Things will become increasingly disordered with time, releasing their energy in lesser and lesser levels of infra-red radiation as entropy progresses.

Not until all matter has been stripped of its latent heat, frozen beyond any conception of the word "freeze", will there be a cessation of the progress of entropy. Where will all that heat have gone? It will have been dissipated into infinite space, radiated beyond the reach of every atom. The "heat" will have been stretched out until it is flattened and cold, and then to disappear from existence entirely.

But until that far distant time, which could a quintillion years from now, or longer, there will be the ceaseless dance of molecules. Ever changing shapes and configurations, shuffled and reshuffled again as if in infinite atomic poker games. Atoms will accidentally form shapes and designs of nearly limitless kinds. Only their "death" at that future heat death at "absolute zero" (a sort of comical expression, really, any other kind of "zero" would not really be "zero" at all...) could ever stop the endless dancing of atoms and particles of matter.

Certainly, as the temperature reduces, the freedom of movement of each atom is reduced. The crystal forms will be less and less able to be altered. The atoms will be forced to dance in smaller and smaller arenas, as in the crystalline methane snow of Pluto. It is unlikely that hydrogen will become anything more complicated than methane in such an environment, yet it is even there, frozen as solid as solid can be, the most minute organic molecule, like a tiny frozen biscuit, food for bacteria that might come along someday.

Of course, with the addition of "dark matter" and other exotic formats of energy and space, there may be other completely separate complexities of which I know nothing, and can only just pretend to imagine, but even so, the meaning of "existence" must include those things as well, even though nothing is known about them. But rather than subtracting from the complexity of simple matter, it can only add more.

Anyway, this is what I tend to "believe", if I must use such a word -- that atoms and energy ARE life. They have always been alive, at the most basic level, and always will be. As ever increasingly complex "life forms" such as ourselves come into existence, certainly far more complex than basic atoms, they are able to look upon these little bricks of super-simple life and wonder -- how did these little things get created? Was there an intelligent maker? Or did these things just emerge from the infinite goop of nothingness?

Wallpaper Images

I have written some software based on 3D rendering algorithms for generating somewhat surreal scenes of massive floating chrome balls floating over a multicolored terrain made from boulder sized cubes and even more massive reflecting pools and blocks. The pixels of background images are used for coloring each block, in various "secret ways" which cause the most aesthetically pleasing effects.

I must thank "SuperJer" for some of the original ideas and algorithms, however I extensively rewrote them to handle very large mapping objects with the eventual goal of individual pixels instead of each "large block" that currently is rendered. That kind of detail takes a very large amount of memory even with more efficient storage methods, and will also require massive processing, which is currently being done on an Alienware computer using an Intel Core i7 CPU with 8 processing cores and very fast memory, etc.

Self-chosen Man.

For a million years or so, Mankind has been poking and scraping at things on this planet, sometimes eating them, sometimes just making shapes to amuse themselves, sometimes just destroying things accidentally. We are good at that.

And ever since then, when Mankind ate of the "fruit" of the tree of knowledge, the world has not been so innocent ever again. Before we came along there could never be Pekingese dogs. There could never be Texas longhorns. There could never be Siamese cats. There could never be popcorn. And there could not even be modern humans unless there were proto-humans who made the initial qualitative choices that led to our genetic form.

We made all of those things appear on the Earth, quite unnaturally. There was the time before when natural selection purely laid the foundations of life. If a life form was weak or unsuited for a particular niche, too bad. It was gone. And the same thing applied to early hominids. It is not clear, exactly, what the environment held against us in those days, but certainly large wild animals, very bad weather, and even very savage fellow hominids all had a hand in their doom. Some kinds of human habitats are similarly savage even today, such as in grizzly bear country, or in places where tigers or leopards still roam.

It is somewhat harder to follow the next phase of logic, which was that as hominids became ever so slightly more intelligent, even though barely above the intelligence of a baboon, their mental processes became part of the "natural selection" process as well.

Although I'm certain we did not consciously create ourselves from the raw material of lesser apes, I am sure that we made choices about who we mated with, who we slaughtered, who we befriended and so forth, on increasingly more arbitrary, qualitative criteria. I call this "augmented" natural selection.

Of course the hominids had already inherited many traits from their ape ancestors, just as we can observe in modern versions of apes. Still, there are no "human-like" apes except for humans. Chimpanzees and gorillas may share many traits, but they are clearly not performing the same kind of "augmented" natural selection which is the hallmark of human genealogy. If they did, they would have become sentient beings like ourselves. They did not.

Let's make a cruel but plausible scenario in which early man might have made decisions that effected evolution. For instance, let's assume that, for whatever reason, there was some bad weather, some limited food stuffs, and few food animals to hunt. It is also most likely that males were the dominate ones of our species in most (but not all) aspects of life. They still seem to be the most dominate today, although not in quite so pronounced a manner.

So, if the alpha male has to make choices of who gets to eat and who doesn't, what criteria might there be? The male, being as shallow as modern males, perhaps, might choose more sexually appealing females to keep and drive away the others. (I'm not sure what "appealing" meant for the earlier hominids, maybe odor, maybe looks, who knows?)

The males in the group might either have been held at "spear tip" distance, or at least allowed to remain in the group on a strict value basis, such as whether they were essential for hunting, excelled at tool making, or even if they were merely good friends with the head honcho.

Males that encroached on the alpha male's gang of females might not be so appreciated, but there may be room for sharing some of the females so long as there is a benefit to the group in the opinion of the alpha male. No matter how prodigious an alpha male might be, he still can only service so many females in a given time. So it is unlikely that an alpha male could successfully keep every single female to himself, because even if he's the meanest, most selfish hulk on the hill, he has to sleep sometime and the females could be very sneaky in their own quests.

Still, some kind of understanding about that would effect who mates with the females and who doesn't. This is another area for qualitative selection to be enforced.

Certainly, at some point along the way, the sexual habits of the humans began to reflect their intelligence, both in the conscious selection of mates and in the choices which females themselves could make amongst the children they bore. Even the shapes and functions of the sex organs became selected for.

In purely aesthetic areas, if a child was somehow too ugly, or had something "unappealing" about it, the females might neglect it, allowing the unfortunate mutants to wither away. In some animal species the females actively seek out and kill babies for many reasons, including jealousy, anger, mutation and perhaps even "having slightly the wrong odor."

Humans react to babies in predictable ways in modern times, however even the most mutated human babies might be sheltered by parents now and then. There are many cases of idiot savants, the Elephant Man, paraplegics and so forth, who would probably just die if subjected to a more natural setting. On the other hand, just as many of the same conditions would spell certain doom to those poor children, from either stark neglect or outright infanticide by frustrated, disappointed parents.

I wonder how many infants where "drawn and quartered" in the courts of ancient kings, such as with the stories of Solomon. It is not so much that Solomon actually did such things, but the fact that the women in the story about "who the real mother was" actually believed Solomon would and could do such a thing was telling.

But infant killings are rare enough and specialized enough that they are usually understandable, and usually out of necessity. One cannot keep a baby alive if it has no brain, or if the skin cannot form around its internal organs, or if its bones grow together in a knot, etc. Whether human or animal, those cases are hopeless. Yet in human society, those cases can lead to greater knowledge about the mechanics of genetics.

It could be a side effect of modern medicine, whereby keeping alive babies which were deemed hopeless in earlier times, that we will ruin our genetic heritage. But I think we have already ruined it, many eons ago. We can never be "naturally selected" again. If conditions on this planet become so terrible that only the "most fit" can survive, then the greatest majority of us are certainly doomed. I cannot even imagine what kind of person it would take, because I don't know what the conditions really will be. Many past extinctions occurred with animals which were far more adapted to harsh conditions that we are.

But, technology being a kind of "ace in the hole", it may be that it will not be the most brutish of the brutes that survive, but the geekiest of the geeks, instead. As for the females? I have no clue. But, if you notice, geekiness knows no sexual boundaries.

My Failure

Although in my years on this planet I have attempted many things of various gradations of difficulty, and have failed at many along the way, there are a few failures which bother me more than others, and one in particular that bothers me the most.

First of all, I failed high school. This was not a problem with intelligence, nor with schoolwork at all. It was merely because of problems at home, in a dysfunctional family fraught with distracting emotional turmoil and typical teenage anxiety on my part. This was mended later, after a long interruption.

Secondly, I failed in the US Navy. Although I always did my job well and was very bright and capable, I did not obey the primary law of the armed forces: no matter who is right -- I am wrong.

Having been removed from the Navy with an "honorable" but general discharge, I then set forth to mend the first problem. I took and passed tests which allowed me to enter college for a degree in engineering. But, sure enough, I eventually failed that as well.

Due to issues with living in Lubbock, Texas, problems with a failed marriage, and problems with a tornado that destroyed my job -- I just left for California without ever getting a degree. These are not so much excuses -- merely facts. I was to blame for most of those problems as well. I cannot be blamed for the tornado, however.

In the years that followed there were many other ups and downs, but there were great successes in my life, finally. I was able to learn about computers to a very great depth, including digital electronics, systems engineering and software engineering. This also occurred during a time of explosive growth in the use of computers for everything from space, military, business, art, music and robotics to medicine and home recipes, which was all very fortunate for my career.

The one category, robotics, was my most favored, and the one in which I buried myself the furthest. Sadly, however, the USA was not so interested in robots in comparison to Japan or other countries. So this was not a sustainable career choice.

And therein lies my most dismal failure. I had intended to develop an "autonomous being", a partly robotic, partly computational "animal" -- and thought that certainly during my life that if I worked hard enough and studied all the sciences necessary, that I could surely accomplish this feat. It did not necessarily need to be human-like, but certainly most people would identify with such a "being" more than any other.

As time went on, and the number of disciplines I found necessary to study began to mount and the interruptions from the necessity in pursuit of a living, there were glimpses of the failure I would someday feel so sadly about. For one thing, I could not merely depend on knowing electronics, which is in itself a complexity which can consume one's mind entirely. The details for creating integrated circuitry, with the myriad molecular surface interactions, electron tunneling, metallurgical and chemical effects and so forth, involve entire fields of science unto themselves.

I could not depend on my knowledge of physics, which was also in depth, but certainly only a minute fraction of the amount I would need to know if I was to truly learn the secrets to creating an "autonomous being".

Even to the degree to which electronics and physics overlapped, at the junction between leptons and quarks of quantum mechanics, was a problem so difficult that even Einstein faced failure. And I am certainly no Einstein.

But despite those issues and many others regarding the sheer number of scientific disciplines I would need to master, there was the lack of understanding, generally, of what provides animals and especially humans with their psychological and physiological "computational brain" abilities at all. What gave them their autonomy, their consciousnesses and sensory faculties? It was possible to trace out neuronal pathways, nerve endings and all that, but was there also some "magical" substance that could not be generated mechanically or biochemically?

Great arguments along this line persist and they overlap many philosophies, sciences and religions. What constitutes life and bodies and minds? Is life something that can be "designed" by creatures as limited as ourselves? Or does it require supernatural Gods? Or is it only something that emerges from the muck -- completely unguided, completely by accident? I don't know, although it seems to be the "accidental" one.

Anyway I failed. I am old enough now to know I never will accomplish that lifelong goal. I shall never devise any such thing as an "autonomous being". And what is worse is that I may never even understand what such a thing really is. The complexity is just too great for my inadequate mind. Perhaps it is too great for any mind.

I did create many "self-organized" programs. They perhaps touch upon certain tiny pieces of something that could emerge as an "autonomous being", but certainly they were too simple in themselves to count. Maybe if I wrote a million more such programs, and let them fight it out in the cybernetic arena, just by accident, and perhaps only for a few milleseconds -- I might have provided for the existence of "autonomous beings." But that would not be a success. That would merely be an accident.

Epilogue:

I failed, yes. But then all of our existence as true autonomous beings could be merely an accident. We are a kind of failure of the universe. The universe -- just for a little while -- failed! It failed to exhibit the usual, normally expected, increasing disorder. It didn't "do entropy" correctly. Not for the last 3 or 4 billion years, at least.

If the universe failed in this, it means that something, far in the distant past, failed even more so. Because at some point in time, whether at the point of the "Big Bang" or in some other "Little Bangs", the universe was suddenly very orderly (so there is something from which disorder is being made). And by creating "autonomous beings" like ourselves, it made a puzzlingly profound order from the chaos.

But, don't you worry. We shall make up for this lack of entropy by manufacturing an extra amount. We always have.

Product Ideas

Press on any image to see a larger version.

1. TCX CLIENT

The Tcx Client program is only half of a program. You would have to imagine the other half of this program -- the Tcx Server, because it is invisible and there might be hundreds of them. Tcx Client automatically handles multiple Fuzzy Text Search requests to as many servers as are available -- in parallel. This was written in a wxWidgets C++ gui builder, using Code::Blocks and wxSmith. Tcx stands for Text Content Indexing.

2. IMAGE WORK

The Image Work program was built using QtCreator and private C libraries. (There is also a wxWidget version.) The program allows experimenting with various image processes and contains a built-in HTML browser that Qt provides. Image Work also stores neural encoded features about each image, so that the program recognizes images which are similar to the currently displayed image.

I imagine there are dozens of programs with the main idea behind this one. But the recognition system behind this one does work. The wxWidgets version of this same program is actually more capable in many areas, but the Qt version is more attractive for this picture...

3. IMAGE DISPLAY

ImageDisp was an earler, less complicated program which just displayed images, and that's about it. The good part about this and all these programs is that they all work on Linux and Windows (Vista too). They will supposedly work on Macs, but they aren't tested on one as of yet, besides, Macs are so perfect they don't need software.

This early program was merely a tutorial for me while learning wxWidget's imaging abilities. It is handy enough, though, so I use it on all my machines. There is an identical Qt version, but not for commercial purposes, which is Qt's fly in the ointment.

4. WAV FILE SOUND ANALYSIS

wxWave simply loads .WAV sound files and allows analyzing their spectral signatures.

It is the precursor to a program that will recognize speech or other sounds in the same way that the above Image Work program recognizes images. Although still images are more complex than speech, they are somewhat easier to manage because they are "still". You can never have "still" speech. It is always moving. But the idea is somewhat similar: find neural features within sounds and store them for later recognition.

Other than the intended recognition part, there are far more interesting forms of this type of program out there, but none of them did what I want to do. This technology will also be part of a more ambitious attempt to index both movies and sounds -- something my assortment of home computers will struggle with. I think an Intel i7 would be necessary, at least.

5. IMAGE DISPLAY with OPENCV

This is "ImageDisp with Video Capture" (featuring yours truly.) It also has the ability to process video in real time, so far as the underlying hardware is capable of that. This program is an experiment using wxWidgets + OpenCV (Intel's open sourced Computer Vision algorithms.) My own personal set of C/C++ image processing algorithms are simultaneously usable as well, although the OpenCV versions are often higher performance, if not so easy to use, mainly because of their ability (in a few cases) to use specialized Intel hardware tricks.

This video display is using a function which performs image transformations with a more artistic bend (the Plasticize effect) rather than anything utilitarian, just for the display.

There is also another part to the Gui to select options and parameters for things like that.

Qt versus wxWidgets (update)

I have tried OpenCV with Qt, which I suspected might have Windows DLL problems, but it does work. So both the wxWidgets and Qt systems seem about the same performance using OpenCV on Intel hardware. I have used the same code on both Xp and Linux.

Gui Builders

I only bother with these GUI builders to make sure the programs are completely portable AND high quality. Otherwise I would just choose whichever was the easiest and be done with it.

Qt takes about 10 times as much space on disk (or installation blob) as wxWidgets. I'm not sure why, exactly, although in some cases Qt has better (or at least prettier) versions of things, such as the QWebKit stuff. There may be differences in the compiler that accounts for the tremendous difference in code size -- for instance embedded debugging information, or translations to other languages, etc. I haven't figured it out, but I intend to.

Another problem with Qt is that it is commercial, and licensing must be bought if Qt is used to make commercial products. I wouldn't mind paying for it, so long as I was being paid for my work, too. That gets harder and harder as time goes on in today's world.

There may be questions like, "Why don't I also have a .NET version of this if I'm going to have 2 or 3 versions of things anyway?" Because the .NET or even MFC environment makes things very difficult for getting down to the nitty gritty and incorporating random C or C++ stuff into them. But I can overcome those difficulties. It is 99% because they are non-portable, and all the considerable work I would expend for them would need to be re-engineered for another machine or operating system.

I will say that I like the Vc++ compiler and DevEnv debugger the best of all, but even those fail in some places where g++ and gdb survive. My nastiest bugs took both worlds of debugging tools to cross laser beams on the problem. Besides, I can still use those tools mixed in with wxWidgets anyway.

One More Thing...

I have recently tried using a few web based tools (in addition to many that I already used...), and have experimented with MySQL, controlled from a webpage with PHP. It works pretty good, really, although the combinations of Apache2.2, PHP and MySQL all at once on my Xp system seems to have jumped memory usage up a good notch -- like several hundred megabytes.

Here is the web page screenshot. (There is no real link... only on private network.)

Robot with Rat Brain Neurons

I excerpted this from an Internet Article because it was a few months old and I was afraid it might disappear after not too long. It may still disappear, at least the picture.

I am always impressed with the sorrow that man cannot make robots anything like what we envisioned them to be during the last century. We must still depend on the brain designs that nature provided.

This article -- Robot with Rat Brain Neurons -- came from Science-Fiction-News

Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.

This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections," said Warwick.

"Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.

"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions.

Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities -- several MEA "brains" that the scientists can dock into the robot.

"It's quite funny -- you get differences between the brains," said Warwick. "This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to."

Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of experiments.

But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be attributed to quantity not quality.

Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Humans have 100 billion.

"This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where we can look -- and control -- the basic features in the way that we want. In a human brain, you can't really do that," he said.

For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.

"The project gives us a unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons," he said.

From