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Scientists Taught a Clump of Human Brain Cells to Play Doom

They weren’t very good at it.

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The internet has a long, rich history of getting the classic video game Doom to play on a wide variety of things, from pregnancy tests to a classic TI-84+ calculator that itself was powered by potatoes. It’s an engineering challenge where people get to demonstrate they can accomplish incredibly stupid things as long as they put their minds to it. Well, someone has taken that idea to an extreme and has put Doom on a brain.

As reported by New Scientist, a clump of living human brain cells has learned to play Doom. Not well. It’s quite bad at it, actually. But then again, I’m backseat gamer-ing a clump of brain cells, so maybe I’m the idiot here?

The freakish experiment that sounds like it’s just gotta be committing at least a dozen human rights violations or something is happening at an Australian biotech firm called Cortical Labs, using microelectrode arrays that can both stimulate neurons and read their electrical activity.

The Doom Brain Company Is the Same That Taught Neurons to Play Pong

In 2021, the company made headlines when they got around 800,000 neurons to play Pong. That took 18 months. A handful of years later, they got about a quarter of those neurons to play a much more complex 2.5D game like Doom in less than a week.

The team translated the game’s visuals into electrical stimulation patterns. Different neural firing patterns triggered different in-game actions. It’s not a complex set of actions; this is a game from 1993. The interactions begin and end with moving, turning, and shooting. You couldn’t even jump in the first Doom. The neurons responded in real time, adapting their activity as they received feedback.

The researchers stress that the neurons are alive, but it’s not like they’ve got a gooey pulsating human brain on a pedestal somewhere with all sorts of needles and wires sticking out of it, and they’re not doing all this for some sick thrill. As Cortical Labs’ chief scientific officer Brett Kagan told New Scientist, the culture is better understood as a biological material capable of processing information in ways silicon can’t or can’t do easily.

Maybe one day these organic computer processors will be able to control robotic limbs or some kind of hybrid bio-digital devices. But for now, it’s impressive (and frightening!) that it can play Doom badly.

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