MELBOURNE: Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter “Doom” and say they are only scratching the surface of what the neurons might be capable of doing.
This is the science fiction work of biotechnology experts at Cortical Labs, who have researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system.
Each “biological computer” contains approximately 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells harvested from donated blood.
After mastering the simple computer game “Pong,” in which a racket is moved up and down to send a ball through a screen, brain cells moved on to bigger things.
Initially, the neurons were at the “level of a beginner who has never played a video game before,” said Alon Loeffler, senior applications scientist at Cortical Labs. AFP.
“Doom” involves a chaotic 3D game world in which the user must explore their environment and eliminate enemies – a difficult task for a group of cells.
“They were often walking into walls, shooting at walls, turning around, doing funny things like that,” Loeffler said.
“And then eventually they started targeting enemies more regularly and more correctly.”
It’s not the cleanest execution, however. A demon requires multiple attempts to slay, with shots fired in multiple directions before the target is hit.
But mind-blowing research proves that neurons can adapt to stimuli in real time and achieve goal-directed learning, claims Cortical Labs.
“Scratch the surface”
The researchers converted “Doom’s” digital environment into patterns of electrical signals that the chip’s neurons could understand.
When an enemy appears, specific electrodes stimulate the neurons of the special chip called CL1, making them react.
Different patterns of neural activity produce specific responses, such as firing a gun or moving left or right.
Researchers monitor the electrical activity of neurons from a computer screen connected to the CL1, represented by thousands of small dots.
From this data, the team adjusts its input to influence and drive the activity of the neuron.
The CL1 isn’t limited to computer games: the chip can be coded to run a range of applications, from drug testing to AI-like machine learning.
“We are only scratching the surface of what these neuronal cultures can achieve when integrated into systems like our CL1,” said Brett Kagan, chief scientific and operational officer.
“Our neural cultures have been explored for a variety of tasks,” he said, ranging from “robotics to AI-like real-time learning tasks, healthcare, medicine, disease modeling, drug screening and even personalized medicine.”
Not “crazy science”
Kagan describes the CL1 chip as “a more durable and powerful form of intelligence.”
The human brain operates with an estimated power of 20 watts, a level of efficiency that silicon computing and artificial intelligence have yet to replicate.
While it’s “not meant to replace what AI does,” it aims to “give us capabilities we’ve never had before,” Kagan said.
The cells have a lifespan of six months and are not yet capable of producing consistent, programmable results.
But analysts say the project’s value could lie in its more sustainable power consumption compared to conventional chips.
“We need better ways to manage this energy envelope and achieve higher levels of efficiency,” said William Keating, CEO of semiconductor research firm Ingenuity.
“This isn’t some crazy science or a bunch of crooks. This is real science, and it’s making real progress.”
