- Australian startup Cortical Labs taught 200,000 brain cells in a petri dish to play Doom
- The project translates Doom's digital signals into electrical stimulation for neurons
- Cortical Labs' CL1 machine uses Python commands to integrate living cells with computing
In what is being described as "the world's first code-deployable biological computer", an Australian startup has taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter video game, Doom. The breakthrough by Melbourne-based Cortical Labs comes nearly four years after it taught 800,000 brain cells in a petri dish connected to a computer how to play the 1970s game Pong.
"Doom is chaos. It's 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore its environment and it's hard. To bridge that gap, we needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity," Cortical Labs explained in a YouTube video.
"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 behaviour to do things even like Doom."
Cortical Labs' CL1 machine integrates living cells with simple Python commands, making biological computing accessible via API. By converting video feeds into electrical stimulation patterns, developers managed to stream game data directly to the neurons.
The average human brain holds about 86 billion neurons, enough to fill 430,000 petri dishes, but for this project, Cortical Labs CEO Hon Weng Chong personally provided the majority of the neurons used.
"They're my brain cells, actually, at least most of them are," he told The Guardian, adding: "Essentially we reverse the biological clock back to an embryonic state, induce them into neurons, and put them on a glass chip roughly the size of a 50p piece."
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'Don't Think It's Conscious'
Quizzed if a petri dish of human cells playing a video game was sentient, the project's developer, Sean Cole, disagreed. Cole, who wrote the Python code for the experiment, stated he does not believe the cells are capable of independent thought or making conscious decisions.
"People have different perceptions of what sentience is. I definitely don't think it's conscious. At first, it didn't know how to move, aim or even shoot. Then it would shoot the first two enemies and stop, almost as if it were preserving itself. So it's definitely learning," said Cole.
"We've managed to control a brain to learn in a very controlled environment. The next step could be something like Neuralink, where you inject a chip into the brain to train someone to learn a language faster."
While the neurons playing Doom is impressive, Cortical Labs said the real future application lies in medicine, where experimental drugs could be tested on neurons grown outside the body.
