Researchers say they have successfully trained living human brain cells to play the classic video game Doom, marking the latest experiment in so-called “biological computing.”
Australian biotech company Cortical Labs announced the development in a recent demonstration showing neurons grown in a laboratory interacting with the 1993 first-person shooter.
The experiment builds on earlier work from 2022, when the company revealed that clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish had learned to play the much simpler video game Pong.
Those early experiments involved “mini-brains” made up of roughly 800,000 to one million living human neurons.
According to the company, the cells demonstrated the ability to adapt and learn basic tasks in real time.
Now researchers say they have taken the technology further by teaching the neurons to interact with the far more complex environment of Doom, a three-dimensional game that requires movement, targeting, and exploration.
To make the system work, engineers translated the digital signals from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation that the neurons could interpret.
“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Cortical Labs chief scientific officer Brett Kagan explained in a video announcement.
“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning.”
“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”
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