Scientists try out neuroscience analytical tools on our favorite processor simulator. The idea is to see if the tools can predict things we already know about the 6502. If not, are they really that effective for learning about the brain?

http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Interesting, but can't read it with all the pop-ups.

Ditto. In under a minute my screen was so cluttered the article was barely visible.

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Bummer. Sorry about that. I came across it in my physical copy but looked up the link to post here.

The article is all about this paper, which might be just as good to read:
Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? by Eric Jonas , Konrad Paul Kording

Do you guys not have an adblocker? I didn't get anything but the initial one asking me to subscribe.

It's much better to read the source, which is the link that BigEd provided.
It's quite interesting and I think it's relevant too. It's all about questioning the way conclusions are drawn from methods and results w.r.t. neuroscience.

Yea, better article there. The economist appears to be part of the 'mainstream media' where they water down articles and only care about the ad revenue

I started messing with neural nets and AI in high school and college. I had gotten a popular science magazine with a cover pic of MIT's insect robots, would have been the early 90's. They built these 6 legged walking robots and ran some AI software and they would learn to walk. Search for Ghengis and Attilia (I may have spelled that wrong) and you can find a couple pics on an archived page. I started to build my own, found small brass square and round tubing about 1/8" and flat sheet and started building the legs and body. I bought a bunch of scrap floppy drives from IBM PS2's and planned to use those stepper motors. We got an early Microchip PIC programmer at school and I started making my own PIC based hardware 'neurons'. I was going to run all the lower level stuff with PIC's and then the central system was a 68,000. The PICs would coordinate all the walking so the 68k just had to send a walk command on the net and was then free'ed up to do tasks such as vision or whatever. I had already moved from 6502 to 68k by then, didn't know about a 16bit 6502 yet.

Was the physical copy a pop-up book? lol...sorry, couldn't resist.

_________________
Cat; the other white meat.