Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week
Source: Slashdot
Background
In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used neuron‑powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on micro‑electrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers trained the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen.
New Development
Cortical Labs has now created an interface that makes it easier to program these biological chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, used Python to teach the chips to play the video game Doom, accomplishing this in roughly a week.
“Unlike the Pong work that we did a few years ago, which represented years of painstaking scientific effort, this demonstration has been done in a matter of days by someone who previously had relatively little expertise working directly with biology,” says Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs.
“It’s this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting.”
Performance
- The Doom‑playing neuronal chip used about a quarter as many neurons as the earlier Pong demonstration.
- It performed better than a randomly firing player but far below the best human players.
- Learning speed was much faster than that of traditional silicon‑based machine‑learning systems, and the chip could improve further with newer learning algorithms.
Kagan cautions against direct comparisons with human brains:
“Yes, it’s alive, and yes, it’s biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can’t recreate in silicon.”
Resources
- YouTube video showing the CL1 biological computer running Doom.
- GitHub repository containing the source code and a README with additional details.