Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week

Link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/02/27/233...

Researchers at Cortical Labs used living human neurons grown on a chip to
learn how to play Doom in about a week. "While its performance is not up to
par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to
useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms," reports New
Scientist. From the report: In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs
used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of
clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode
arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to
carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the
screen. Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to
program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An
independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play
Doom, which he did in around 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." The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as
many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly
firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players.
However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine
learning systems and should be able to improve its performance with newer
learning algorithms, says Kagan. However, it's not useful to compare the
chips with human brains, he says. "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." Cortical
Labs posted a YouTube video showing its CL1 biological computer running Doom.
There's also source code available on GitHub, with additional details in a
README file.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528