Petri dish of human brain cells just learned to play iconic '90s video game
At least they've got good taste in their retro games
You might want to work on your trigger finger, because before long, petri dishes of human cells could soon be better than us at video games. While the likes of Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and basically any FromSoftware video game are considered some of the 'hardest' of all time, it feels like they're getting harder as the industry evolves.
Then again, gaming has ballooned since those early days of Pong, meaning players continue to expect something new as they complain they've seen it all before. The legacy of id Software's Doom lives on, and while it's true that the company's Wolfenstein 3D is regarded by many as the 'first' first-person shooter, it was Doom that popularized the genre.
Doom is about as big as they come in terms of iconic video game franchises, but alongside the many sequels and 2016 reboot, we've also seen a trend of people playing the 1993 game on a whole host of weird and wonderful items.
From an iPod Classic to a Samsung smart fridge, the display of a Porsche 911 to playing it inside Minecraft, one of the most famous inventions is the person who managed to run Doom on a pregnancy test. Now, scientists have taken it one step further, with a petri dish of 200,000 human brain cells now being able to play the granddaddy of all video games.
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After celebrating previous success when it taught 800,000 neurons to play the aforementioned Pong in 2022, the Melbourne-based Cortical Labs has upped its game and turned the petri dish into its very own Doomguy.
In its latest video, Cortical Labs claims that its CL1 system boasts the honor of being the “world’s first code deployable biological computer." Pong wasn't enough for those ever-grumpy gamers, and like with the trend of playing Doom on anything and everything, the comments were quickly flooded with people asking for the cells to level up.
Dr. Brett Kagan explained the challenge, with Pong being 'much simpler' and Doom being 'chaos' with its 3D enemies and explorable environments.
With the digital world of doom having to be translated into the biological language of neurons, the team was able to map the game in patterns of electrical stimulation. Although the cells can move Doomguy around and shoot at enemies, Kagan admitted it's not exactly an esports champion: "Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who's never seen a computer. And in all fairness, they haven't.
"But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning."
Part of this learning is teaching the cells what actions are right and wrong, leading to Cortical Labs solving the interface problem. Setting a challenge to you gamers out there, Dr. Alon Loeffler says that "the neurons' ability to play Doom demonstrates the flexibility of biomputation."
Some were scared about where things are heading if a clump of cells can learn to play a video game in a week, with one person writing: "There’s no way this is real. If it is, shut it down now
Another added: "Synths are becoming a bigger possibility day after day."
Trying to separate sci-fi panic from science, a third concluded: "Let's be clear: it still plays like a complete beginner. The real breakthrough isn't the gaming, it's the fact that they successfully built a Python to wetware API."
It's now over to researchers to see what they can build, with Cortical Labs making the API open. In the video, Loeffler concluded: "The only question left is what will you teach them next?"
Considering we've gone from Pong to Doom in five years, the next logical step would be something like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and before you know it, we'll be taking down Elden Ring's Starscourge Radahn with petri dishes of our own brain cells.