Neurocomputing Home

Softstatemagic.com is the community support site for the brain circuit simulation software. There you will find many sample brain circuits that you can freely download and experiment with. You can not yet insert a simple brain into an animal in a virtual world but that is coming. You will also find the paper describing the theory behind these simulations entitled "Soft State Automata".

YouTube videos of some simulations can be found at: youtube.com/user/Ironstead

Introduction

by David Olmsted (this page updated June 27, 2008)

Fig. 1

Welcome to Neurocomputing.org which is designed to be a resource site for those interested in simulations of simple animals in a 3D world with realistic brains.

Figure 1 shows an early prototype simulation using a trilobyte in a 3-D world. It's "brain" also exists in a 3-D world and can be seen in the upper left hand corner. Some responses from selected neurons are seen in the upper right hand corner. The trilobyte is shown successfully moving around an obstical by using its antenna. The proper proceedure for simulating the brain is to follow the course of evolution and work towards complexity. The problem with the prototype is that it was a custom simulation such that one could not design either the brain circuits from the user interface nor the virtual environment.

Analog Logic Neurons Found in the Frog Brain

Perhaps the most important prediction of Soft State Automata theory as applied to the brain is that the brain must accomplish some analog like logic operations since logic like operations are used to characterize state symmetries. Yet some evidence for this already exists in the literature only that its significance has not been realized.

Fig. 2

Figure 2 shows how auditory signals from each ear are combined in a single neuron in the Superior Olivary Nucleus of a frog. (Feng and Capranica - 1978). CL is the response from the contra-lateral ear while IL is the response from the ipsi-lateral ear (on the same side of the brain as the neuron). The CL neuron has a lower sound threshold (44dB) compared to the IL ear (49 dB) so it has a more vigorous response given the same sound intensity. Figure 1 gives the average response at 500 Hz (where they were most responsive) to 20 trials at one trial per second.

Notice that the signals are not summed at the high end away from the unreliable low end (very few action potentials). Instead the response from stimulating both ears is the same as if the CL ear was stimulated by itself. This is a classic multivalued (fuzzy) logic INCLUSIVE OR response.

In another paper (Feng, Hall, Gooler - 1990) the researchers found an AND like neuron. They say this on page 317:

"Unlike DMN (dorsal medullary nucleus) and SON (superior olivary nucleus) neurons however, some (14%) TS (torus semicircularis) cells respond poorly, if at all, to single tones regardless of frequency and level (Fuzessery and Feng, 1982). But these same cells respond vigorously to specific combination of tone and hence represent a neural analog of the logical AND function."

Notice the proposed AND neurons do not respond to individual inputs, no matter how intense the sound, so they cannot represent simple summation operations with thresholds. The neurons must accomplish this via a more complex design.

References

Feng, A.S. and Capranica, R.R. (1978). Sound Localization in Anurans. II. binaural Interaction in Superior Olivary Nucleus of the Green Tree Frog (Hyla cinerea). J. Comp. Physiol. 41:43-5

Feng, Albert S., Hall, Jim C., and Gooler, David M..(1990). Neural Basis of Sound Pattern Recognition in Anurans. Progress in Neurobiology 34:313-329

Fuzessery, Z.N., and Feng, Albert S. (1982). Frequency Selectivity in the Anuran Auditory Midbrain:Single Unit Responses to Single and Multiple Tones. Journal of Comparative Physiology 150:107-119

CHANGE LOG

June 27, 2008 - Updated the this front page to announce the opening of softstatemagic.com. The theory is now called Soft State Automata since that seems to be the most descriptive.

Oct. 25, 2006 - Changed Continuous State Automata to Relativistic State Automata which is a better description of the theory and that it is an extension of finite automata instead of a compliment

Web site by David D. Olmsted. He can be contacted at brainsim1-contact at yahoo dot com (this is an anti-spam tactic. Type the address as normal). Original site established August 21, 1998 by David D. Olmsted. New home page published August 25, 2006

Information compiled by David D. Olmsted © 1998 to 2006 (Free to use for personal and educational use)