Sorting drugs into robots with the brain of a mouse

Once upon a time, before missiles were equipped with electronic homing systems, the US military seriously considered the possibility of guiding missiles to a target using screen-pecking pigeons. Today, scientists are once again examining the combination between biological systems and the development of weapons

The Israeli 'Arrow' missile is one of the most sophisticated interceptor missiles available today. The arrow is designed to hit enemy ballistic missiles, and for this purpose it is guided by a sophisticated steering and control system, which detects the enemy missile and directs the arrow in its wake. When we see the high level of technology that brings the arrow to its target, it is hard to believe that only seventy years have passed since the first missile homing system was invented, which was based on three starved and drugged pigeons.

In 1941, the United States found itself mired in the mud of World War II. This was one of the first wars in which the air forces played a critical role on the battlefield, mainly through bombers that were used to drop bombs and missiles on the enemy's ground forces and cities. The air forces on both sides of the barrier were able to sow mass panic on the ground, but they encountered great difficulties in targeted interception, mainly because effective remote control systems did not yet exist in those days.

The solution to the problem came precisely from the side of Borchus Frederick Skinner. He wasn't an engineer, he wasn't a mechanic, and even in mathematics he barely knew his way around. But he was one of the most important behavioral psychologists in America, and that was enough.

After the Germans bombed Warsaw in 1939, Skinner found himself wondering if a missile could be designed to hit a specific target on the ground. The moment of enlightenment came while he was traveling on a train and watched birds flying in large flocks outside the glass windows. He remained captivated by the sight of the birds maneuvering in the air, changing their paths lightly and flying in circles. Even without formal training in aeronautics, Skinner understood that the winged could be seen as aerodynamic bodies, with superior vision and maneuvering capabilities.

An ordinary engineer would probably trace the principles of bird flight and try to imitate them. But Skinner was a psychologist, so the next step was almost inevitable: he tried to train pigeons to steer missiles.

Pigeons, drugs and aerial warfare

Despite the immediate ridiculousness that the thought evokes, Skinner was able to achieve impressive results and mobilize support for the project from the American military. The pigeons were placed in front of a screen on which the moving target was projected, and trained to regularly peck only the target. Whenever they succeeded in the task, they would be rewarded with a portion of sperm. After the pigeons went through several such training series, they would continue to peck at the target on the screen even without receiving a reward.

The screen itself was a marvel of engineering. It was connected to a sensitive and well-calibrated control system inside the missile. Whenever the screen moved in a certain direction, the movement would cause high pressure air to flow which moved the wings of the missile in the appropriate direction. When the target appeared on the left side of the screen, the pigeon would peck the left side and cause the screen to shift to the left, which translated into shifting the entire missile to the left, towards the target, until it reached the center of the screen - that is, in a straight line to the top of the missile.

Only when the target was exactly in the center of the screen, and the pigeons' pecks hit the exact center of the screen, would the missile continue to move in a straight line to the target. And what if the pigeon was lazy, or died of a heart attack during the launch of the missile? For this purpose, the missiles were designed with three pigeons at the top of each missile, in separate compartments, and the results of their pecks were weighed together to propel the missile.

The system worked well in simple simulations, in which a skilled operator moved a colored image on the screen, while making sure the pigeons received a reward every two minutes. All the pigeons achieved excellent results and pecked at the screen at a rate of four pecks per second, always on target. But how would the pigeons function when trapped inside the missile head?

Skinner decided to test the mental strength of the pigeons. He fired the pistols inches away from their heads, and they kept pecking. He made loud noises all around them, and they kept pecking. He placed them in a pressure chamber that simulated the conditions existing at an altitude of 3,000 meters, spun them in a centrifuge, saturated them with pure oxygen and exposed them to strong flashes of light that simulated explosions in the air. And the pigeons kept pecking.

How did the pigeons manage to stay close to the screen so religiously? The simple explanation is that Skinner made sure to starve them before the experiment, so that their need for sperm

will be stronger than the fear of the environment. Another reason, no less good, may be the fact that in some experiments the pigeons were given hemp seeds as a reward. The hemp, as can be understood from its name, is a relative of the cannabis, from which marijuana and hashish are produced. Although hemp is not effective as a psychoactive drug in humans, Skinner discovered that hemp seeds were more effective than regular seeds in removing any remaining fear from the birds' hearts, allowing them to ignore distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.

Although Skinner's trained pigeons performed well in all simulations, they were never loaded onto actual missiles and launched toward enemy targets. Despite initial support from the state, Skinner was disappointed to receive notice in 1944 of the project's closure. The US military decided to focus on other directions in missile control, perhaps following the success of the Germans in 1943 in directing missiles using radio waves from the mother planes.

But the American army is separate, and the American navy is separate, and one does not always accept the other's decisions. Four years after the elimination of the original project, the Navy decided to re-examine the idea of ​​navigation using pigeons, and the project was given a new life under the name 'Orcon' - Organic Control.

Electronics killed the pigeons

Orkon's pigeons trained in an elaborate simulator that simulated a real missile, with a screen on which color images of the target ships were projected. A metal electrode was attached to the pigeon's beak, and the glass screen conducted electricity and could track the location of the pecks. The control system would change the trajectory of the missile according to the pecks, the pigeon would receive the sperms, and a few seconds later it was supposed to explode together with them on board the target ship. Repeated experiments proved that the pigeons were definitely capable of guiding the missiles, although clouds, waves and silhouettes could make it difficult for them to identify the target.

Despite the success of the Orcon project, it was closed in 1953, when electronic control and command systems began to prove themselves in missile guidance. As a nostalgic souvenir of pigeon pecking, he left an important technological relic in the form of the electrically conductive glass screen, which became a permanent motif in the war rooms of American warships for many years.

Looking back, it is clear that the US military did wisely when it decided to focus on electronic systems, because from then until today no systems have been found capable of guiding missiles with the same level of efficiency, speed and reliability. Electronics reached the peak of its (current) capability in the Second Gulf War.

If World War II was one of the first air wars, then Gulf War II was one of the first information wars. The intelligence information about suspicious targets was immediately transmitted to planes in the skies of Iraq, which launched missiles that could hit a target with an accuracy of a few meters. In this way, there was no danger to the lives of American soldiers, and many targets were neutralized without any danger to life. But such precision has a price, and it comes in the production cost of the sophisticated and delicate electronic systems at the top of the missile. As an example of this, the production price of the Arrow missile, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, is about three million dollars for a single missile. The aerospace industry may be profiting well from the production of the arrow, but it is likely that the investors would have preferred cheaper solutions.

A robot with a biological brain

Today, when the prices of domestic rockets are skyrocketing, some of the engineers - the young, enthusiastic and crazy - are beginning to return to the original idea of ​​combining biology with technology. In this field, one of the most interesting breakthroughs came precisely in the form of a small robot with a biological brain.

Robots of this type are produced in several laboratories around the world, and especially in the laboratories of Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading in England and Steve Potter from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The robot was demonstrated for the first time a year ago, with a control system consisting of three hundred thousand rat nerve cells. The cells grow in a Petri dish in an incubator and form an extensive neural network with each other and with eighty electrodes located at the bottom of the plate.

When the robot moves through the room, the sensors that serve as its eyes are able to detect obstacles in front, and transmit the information in the form of an electric current to the following electrodes in contact with the cell network. The electrodes transmit electrical messages to the cells, which they process in the neural network, and respond by releasing their own electrical messages. These messages are received by the electrodes, which turn them into an electrical signal that is sent to the robot via the Bluetooth protocol, arbitrarily dictating whether it should move to the right or to the left.

Recently, the researchers in the field were able to 'tame' some of the neural tissue cultures, and showed that they were able to make the neural tissue react predictably to the same stimulus, for several hours. It is likely that as the field progresses, the neural network will be able to process more complicated information and return the correct instructions - right, left, up, down. When we reach this situation, a circle will close: the pigeon from the XNUMXs will be replaced by the nerve cells inside the missile.

The original article was published on the blog ofRoey Tsezana