Scientists create the very first AI made from DNA in a test tube: Report

The future of AI may seem a little less I, Robot and a little more Blade Runner .

Caltech researchers built a network of artificial neurons organic material. One day, a more advanced version of the network could potentially diagnose illnesses, make decisions, and even forge one's own memories. For now, he is able to classify the manuscript numbers, as shown in a study published in the journal Nature

Like all neural networks, it mimics the processes that occur naturally in the human brain.

"Humans each have more than 80 billion neurons in the brain, with which they make highly sophisticated decisions: small animals such as roundworms can make simpler decisions using only a few hundred neurons," said Lulu Qian, assistant professor of bioengineering at Caltech. "In this work, we designed and created biochemical circuits that function as a small network of neurons to classify molecular information significantly more complex than before."

Unlike the vast majority of neural networks, it was developed in a test tube, is made from synthetic DNA and looks like a "smart soup".

Why DNA? The single strands of DNA are constructed from the same four molecules (or nucleotides) – A, T, C and G. This makes their reactions extremely easy to predict, whether or not they have evolved naturally or not. They were built in the laboratory.

To show that artificial intelligence can be "programmed" into synthetic biomolecular circuits, the team tested their creation using the challenge of writing – a much harder test than ever before. 39, it does not appear at first thanks to the many variations and, sometimes,

Instead of using "visual writing", the team used a technique called "molecular writing". This means that the writing does not take the form of a number or a letter. In contrast, each unique molecular number is composed of 20 unique DNA strands, each selected from 100 molecules representing different pixels in any 10 by 10 pattern, which have been mixed together in a test tube. . The neural network is able to identify the molecular number as one of the nine digits between 1 and 9.