Australia’s Cortical Labs has released a video showing the game Doom on a biological computer running on a culture of living human neurons. The team says the experiment involved approximately 200,000 neurons placed on a microchip, and the process demonstrates real-time learning.
Australia’s Cortical Labs has released a video showing the game Doom on a biological computer running on a culture of living human neurons. The team says the experiment involved approximately 200,000 neurons placed on a microchip, and the process demonstrates real-time learning.
According to Tom’s Hardware, a working version of Doom for the Cortical Labs platform was put together with independent researcher Sean Cole using the company’s API. In the video, the researchers explain that this is not just «running the game for fun,» but a demonstration of purposeful learning, where the system gradually picks up useful responses and adapts to the task.
The main technical part here is the interface between the game and the neurons. According to Cortical Labs CTO David Gaughan, the Doom video stream was converted into patterns of electrical stimulation so that the neurons could «feel» the events on the screen. The electrical activity of the cells is then mapped to the actions of the character. Individual patterns of activity learned are responsible for a shot or movement, thanks to which «Doomguy» can react to enemies, change position and advance through the level.
The team emphasizes that the result is still far from the level of an e-sportsman. The video notes that the feedback mechanism for correct and incorrect actions still needs to be fine-tuned. At the same time, Cortical Labs believes that the key is that they managed to establish interaction with neurons in real time and teach them behavior through this interface.
Separately, the developers have also played with the «cultural» context of Doom. Over the decades, the game has been launched on a wide variety of devices and platforms, turning it into a kind of industry meme. Now, a biocomputer with living neurons has been added to this list.
Cortical Labs has previously demonstrated its neural culture playing Pong, and a community request to «show me Doom» was one of the motivators for the new demonstration. The company also notes that its work on Doom led to the idea for the Cortical Cloud, an infrastructure for running and training biological computations on more complex tasks.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Australian startup Cortical Labs introduced the commercial biocomputer CL1, which combines living human neurons with silicon chips. This development is capable of processing information in real time and potentially opens a new era in brain research, drug development, and AI.
