This tutorial introduces dendrites. It describes what they are and what can be done with them. All the information in this tutorial was discovered using experiments so it may not be completely correct. The information is pretty much a 'brain dump' of what I've encountered while playing around with brain lobes so it may not be organised particularly well. Any corrections, additions or comments are welcome.
Dendrites are the links between cells in different brain lobes. They are the means for transferring information from one lobe to another. To help describe what dendrites do I'll use the example of the Attention lobe in a Ron norn.
The Attention lobe has forty cell locations. One for each category of object available in Creatures. The cell with the highest output value in this lobe will indicate the object that the norn is currently looking at (ie. paying attention to). The values for each cell are obtained from other lobes. The two lobes used as inputs to this lobe are the Stim Source lobe and the Noun lobe. Each of these two lobes also have forty cell locations. When a cell fires in one of these input lobes the result is carried down dendrites to the equivalent cell in the Attention lobe. The value of each cells from the two input lobes are summed and the result stored in the corresponding cell of the attention lobe. For example, if Cell 2 of Stim Source fires at value 50, Cell 3 of Stim Source fires at value 20, Cell 3 of Noun fires at value 40 then the result in the Attention lobe will be Cell 2 firing at value 50 and Cell 3 firing at value 50. How do the values of the cells get transferred to the Attention lobe? By traveling along dendrites. Dendrites are the electrical wiring between lobes.
If you look at the genetics kit dialog box for the Attention lobe you will see 4 tabs related to dendrites. Choose the first one 'D0 growth' and examine the information there. It tells us that the source lobe for these 'D0' (class 0) dendrites is the Stim Source lobe. That is, there is wiring that transfers information from each cell in the Stim Source lobe to cells in the Attention lobe.
The dendrite properties section tells us how many dendrites there are. In this case there is a minimum of '1' and a maximum of '1' spread out using a 'flat' pattern. This means that for each cell in the Stim Source lobe there will be one dendrite connecting it to the equivalent cell in the Attention lobe.
For now we won't worry about the other information. We'll create a norn with two new brain lobes, wire up the two lobes with different dendrite combinations and view the results.
[...more coming...]
(See the brain lobe page for more information)
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