Scientists at the University of Reading have developed a basic locomotive robot that uses a 'cpu' consisting entirely of cultured neurons. The neurons were grown and spontaneously connected themselves to the motor and sensory components of this monstrosity, and scientists are now hoping that they will gleam insight into memory formation in biological neural networks by having the robot learn to navigate environments with its live brain.I'm not sure how this development compares with a similar thing done a few years back when a set of cultured rat brain cells were used to keep a plane level in a flight simulator. I guess the real breakthrough here is in the fact that there are no other components of the machine capable of processing information besides the neurons, which was not the case with the rat brain.
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