A group of scientists have taught a petri dish full of brain cells how to play the horror shooter game Doom.
In a YouTube video, Australian biotech firm Cortical Labs explained how, in 2021, they taught 800,000 brain cells in a petri dish, connected to a computer, how to play the 1970s game Pong. Now, the “system” they call the CL1 is the “world’s first code deployable biological computer” and can play Doom.
“Pong was much simpler. There was a direct relationship: The ball went up, the paddle went up. It was a direct input-output relationship,” the research team explained in the video. “Doom was much more complex.”
“Doom is chaos. It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore its environment and it’s hard,” Cortical Labs continued. “To bridge that gap, we needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity.”
According to the firm, it uses microelectrode arrays that can stimulate neurons and read their electrical activity.
“While there’s still a lot of work left to do on this, the exciting thing is we’ve solved the interface problem,” said the team. “We have a way to interact with these cells in real time and train them and shape their behavior to do things even like Doom.”
Though the cells can play Doom, the firm is clear that it won’t be outperforming human players anytime soon.
“Is it an e-sports champion? Absolutely not,” the firm explained. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, shoot, and spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.”