Scientists Taught a Petri Dish of Brain Cells to Play ‘Doom’—They’re Getting Better

How many brain cells does it take to play a game of DOOM?

BY MARÍA JOSÉ GUTIERREZ CHAVEZ, EDITORIAL FELLOW

Illustration: Getty Images

In 2022 Cortical Labs, the team that taught a petri dish full of 800,000 brain cells connected to a computer how to play the 1970s game Pong. Now years later, the team is leveling up as they claim their CL1 system is the “world’s first code deployable biological computer,” and is able to 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 a YouTube video. “Doom was much more complex.

With its own active Reddit thread and booming fanbase, the first-person shooter simulation game requires players to slay their opponents as they traverse through its universe. Previous iterations of the game featured pixelated rendering, while newer versions show more complex characters and landscapes. But, translating a game made for human eyes was a challenge no matter the pixels.

“Doom is chaos. It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore its environment and it’s hard,” Cortical Labs said. “To bridge that gap, we needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity.”

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Doom was not chosen just for its complexity, but also for being an internet favorite. 

Few games have been meme-ified quite like Doom, and in the past, many have capitalized on the joke. Scientists have gotten E. Coli cells to play it, taught rats how to shoot in it, and some have even developed a candy bar that runs the game inside. 

“While there’s still a lot of work left to do on this, the exciting thing is we’ve solved the interface problem,” the team added. “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.”

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