The researchers teamed up with Google DeepMind since the platform has developed tools to train artificial neural networks (ANNs) that can help control biomechanical models of animals in physics simulators...

Using the ANNs, the researchers were able to build inverse dynamic models, which scientists believe our brains use to guide bodily movements and enable us to move from the current state of the body to the desired state.

“In more bodily terms, one can think of an inverse model as producing the muscle activations required to achieve a desired posture, subject to the physics of the body. This framework is useful for motor neuroscience, as coordinating movement involves learning how to account for the physical properties of one’s body through experience interacting with the world,” Aldarondo added in the email.

The data from real rats helped the virtual model learn the forces needed to produce the desired movement to reach a desired state, even if it was not explicitly trained on them. When neural activity was measured for both the real rats and the virtual model, the researchers found that the virtual model accurately predicted the neural activity of real rats.

(Via InterestingEngineering)

One of the earliest descriptions of a synthetic intellect occurs in The Machine That Thought by William Callahan:

However, there were things there which did not belong in the pilot chamber of any ordinary vessel. Among them was a large, square case, from which many wires radiated. It contained the cool, synthetic intellect of MZ-1. Minds that could compare with it in keenness and power, existed only in the Place of Knowledge. MZ-1 was not like the worker and soldier robots whose simple reasoning faculties are adapted only to routine duties. MZ-1 was the first of its kind; it was a superthing, for in it were united the strength and mobility of the fastest space ship, and the mental powers of a thought machine.

The latter were marvelous fabrications now. Five hundred years ago a genius named Benz had invented the first. Its mental abilities had been about equal to those of a man, though its memory and its mathematical capacities were more accurate. Benz had made a score of the machines, and he had put them to the task of designing others. Improvements had been rapid. The first machines had swiftly become obsolete. Those they had invented had taken their place ; and these latter, in turn, invented sentient mechanisms which were a little ahead of themselves. So it had gone, stop by step, year after year, until the synthetic intellects at the Place of Knowledge had far outstripped the minds of men, and had reached a level of thought that was truly deific.

It might have been said that Benz was the last human being really to think. After his time, all thought and all invention was mechanical.