An essay in ‘The Transmitter’ on the role of genes and physics in brain wiring. When is it useful to understand this type of self-organization as a mechanism in brain development? Brain organoids that develop from induced pluripotent stem cells into patterned brain structures are sometimes described as beautiful examples of self-organization. But where is the mechanistic insight in this?…
The information content of the brain, i.e. the size of a hard drive it would take for lossless up- anddownloading of information stored in biological neural networks of any size, is unknown. Bycontrast, the information content of artificial neural networks that underlie virtually allcontemporary artificial intelligence, is well defined and can be saved on a hard drive in a precisenumber…
You can describe a digital image by describing the coordinate and color of every individual pixel, meaning each of the smallest component ‘dots’ that together make up the picture. Since pictures taken with modern cell phones and cameras have an ever increasing resolution, this leads to rather large image files to save and send to friends. Fortunately, most images can…