[Spartacus]

Researchers at a Melbourne start-up have taught their “biological computer” made from living human brain cells to play Doom.

Cortical Labs, which made headlines in 2022 after teaching neurons in a dish to play Pong, said the internet had “immediately asked the only question that matters in computing: can it run Doom?”

In a video shared last week, the Brunswick-based firm revealed the latest milestone for the CL1, its flagship product launched in March last year — the footage shows the player in the classic 1993 shooter, controlled by human brain cells, blasting away at demons with the caption “real neuron gameplay”.

The CL1, a shoebox-sized device containing around 200,000 living human neurons attached to a silicon chip and kept alive with nutrients, is billed by Cortical Labs as the “world’s first code deployable biological computer”.

“We showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Dr Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ chief scientific officer and chief operations officer says.



“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning. But it took us over 18 months with our original hardware and software to get this to work, and Pong was much simpler — the ball went up, the paddle went up. It was a direct input-output relationship.

“Doom was much more complex. Doom is chaos. It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore its environment and it’s hard. So we’ve built a neurocomputing system to allow anyone to program this game. To bridge that gap, we needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity.”

Cortical Labs has created an application programming interface (API) to allow customers to interact with the cells living in the CL1 cloud platform — dozens of CL1 units able to be harnessed remotely in a system the team has dubbed “Wetware-as-a-Service” — with simple commands using the Python programming language.

Independent researcher Sean Cole used the API to map the video feed from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation, chief technology officer David Hogan explained.

“When a demon appears on the left of the screen, specific electrodes stimulate the sensory area of the neural culture on the left side,” he said.

“The neurons react to that stimulation. We then listen to their response, the spikes, and interpret that activity as motor commands. If the neurons fire in a specific pattern, the Doom guy shoots. If they fire in another pattern, he moves right, and so on.”

Dr Kagan said the cells can learn to play Doom.

“Yes, they’re receiving information, they’re sending commands to move their character around,” he said.

“They’re able to find enemies, shoot. Is it an e-sports champion? Absolutely not. 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 seen out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning. But just like a human or an animal learning a task, the cells need feedback. They need to know what the right actions are and what the wrong actions are and how they can be trained to improve.

“While there’s still a lot of work left to do on this, the exciting thing is we’ve solved the interface problem.

“We have a way to interact with these cells in real time and train them and shape their behaviour to do things even like Doom. So the interface is solved. Next we need better learning, better encoding, better rewards, better feedback, and we can do this with the CL1.

“Now it’s time to figure out how do we further enhance the learning to allow these cells in the dish not just to play the game Doom, but to really begin to excel at it, and then take on even more complicated tasks.”

Cortical Labs’ scientist Dr Alon Loeffler said the neurons’ ability to play Doom “demonstrates the flexibility of bio-computation”, which the firm believes could be applied to a range of fields including medical research.

“We’re inviting developers and researchers to see what they can build,” he said.

Proponents of bio-computing, including Cortical Labs, say living neurons have a number of intrinsic benefits over the hardware used for traditional AI models, most notably power consumption — supercomputers consume millions of watts of energy, while the human brain uses as little as 20 watts.

The bizarre achievement, while celebrated by many online as an “inspiring milestone”, left others uneasy.

“No vision, no sound, no thoughts, only Doom,” one YouTube commenter wrote.

“Imagine being a semi-aware life form based on the human brain, whose sole purpose is to be trapped in a nightmare science fiction scenario,” another said.

“Everyone who worked on this project is going to spend their next 10 reincarnations as blobs of neurons on microchips,” a third wrote.

The neurons used in the CL1 are grown in a lab using blood donated by volunteers. The blood cells are turned back into stem cells, which are then turned into neurons.

While the neurons, linked to each other and the chip, are nowhere near the complexity of a human brain, bioethicists have raised concerns that over time, larger networks could experience consciousness.

Silvia Velasco, a stem cell researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute who has worked with so-called “cerebral organoids”, told the ABC last year that currently “this is an unfounded concern”.

“But at the same time, it’s important that we evaluate and anticipate potential concerns that the use of these models might raise,” she said.

Those concerns grew in 2019, when scientists picked up human-like electrical activity in lab-grown brains — resembling that of preterm babies — for the first time.

Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California San Diego behind the breakthrough published in the journal Cell Press, said at the time that he did not believe the brain organoids were conscious because of their early stage of development.

“But if you ask me, ‘How do you know?’ I would say I have no evidence either way because we don’t even know how to detect consciousness in other systems,” he told AFP at the time.

“As we get closer to the human brain, all of these ethical questions will appear,” he admitted, proposing the field be subject to agreed-upon limits and regulation.

Dr Kagan told the ABC that while he was aware of the potential concerns, the field was still too young to know where the ethical line was.

“We can’t answer that,” he said.

“That’s the truth. That’s why we work with a large number of bioethicists.

“We don’t want to create any suffering in a dish.”

https://www.news.com.au/technology/onlin...becdb46fd2

[DirkaDirkaJihad]

TL;DR: If you suck at Doom, you are lowlier than a clump of neurons in a glass bowl

[Rowdy Oklahoma]

The CL1, a shoebox-sized device containing around 200,000 living human neurons attached to a silicon chip and kept alive with nutrients, is billed by Cortical Labs as the “world’s first code deployable biological computer”.

Scary stuff. This "biological computer" is rapidly approaching the mental capacity required to apply for government benefits, drink malt liquor, and rape white women.

[Janosz Poha]

Gonna have fallout clankers soon lol.

[AbsurdinessBrown]

Dalek.

[HairMoccasins]

I wonder if people will look back a hundred years from now and say i cant believe these terminator cyborgs full of trapped souls hunting us down started out as clumps on a microchip playing video games.
The fact they retromorphed the brain cells from donated blood is even more sinister.

[Flanders]

Does the brain get any dopamine or other motivation for playing Doom? Why bother if you have no body to protect or sexual urges to fulfill?

Imagine having a consciousness where all you knew was Doom your whole life. Kind of makes you wonder if you're in the Matrix. That movie keeps getting more relevant every year.

[Janosz Poha]

I wonder if people will look back a hundred years from now and say i cant believe these terminator cyborgs full of trapped souls hunting us down started out as clumps on a microchip playing video games.
The fact they retromorphed the brain cells from donated blood is even more sinister.

Or people will be like this one-hundred years from now.....

[TruCoxman]

Something something man made horrors…