In 2024, Elon Musk’s Neuralink implant allowed a quadriplegic patient to play RuneScape and Slay the Spire in his brain. But now, scientists are taking things further, training lab-grown brain cells to play video games sans any connection to an actual human brain. Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone to teach these clumps of cells to play Doom.
Cortical Labs–an Australian neurological research company that used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong in 2021–recently revealed that it has developed a method to easily program those chips using Python. Shortly afterwards, independent developer Sean Cole used the Python interface to Cortical’s brain cell-covered chips to play Doom, a task that only took him about a week to pull off (via NewScientist).
“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,” Cortical Labs’ chief scientific officer Brett Kagan said. “It’s this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting.”
Kagan warns about comparing the chips–which each have roughly 800,000 live brain cells growing on them–to actual 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,” Kagan added.
Still, this new development is incredibly impressive.
“Doom is vastly more complex than earlier demonstrations, and successfully interacting with it highlights real advances in how living neural systems can be controlled and trained,” says University of the West of England professor Andrew Adamatzky.
“What’s exciting here is not just that a biological system can play Doom, but that it can cope with complexity, uncertainty, and real-time decision-making,” Adamatzky added. “That’s much closer to the kinds of challenges future biological or hybrid computers will need to handle.”
Sure beats playing Doom on a pregnancy test.