Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week (newscientist.com)
- Reference: 0180870736
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/02/27/2332219/human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week
- Source link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/
> In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to [2]play Pong . The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen. Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play Doom, which he did in around a week.
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> "Unlike the Pong work that we did a few years ago, which represented years of painstaking scientific effort, this demonstration has been done in a matter of days by someone who previously had relatively little expertise working directly with biology," says Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs. "It's this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting."
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> The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players. However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine learning systems and should be able to improve its performance with newer learning algorithms, says Kagan. However, it's not useful to compare the chips with human brains, he says. "Yes, it's alive, and yes, it's biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can't recreate in silicon."
Cortical Labs posted a YouTube video [3]showing its CL1 biological computer running Doom. There's also source code [4]available on GitHub , with additional details in a [5]README file .
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/
[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/12/20/0510258/researchers-teach-human-brain-cells-in-a-dish-to-play-pong
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE
[4] https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron
[5] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/main/README.md
Most likely bullshit (Score:3)
You can get any logic-gate system to "play Doom". One of the ways I'm familiar with to do this with neurons is use an effect called "spike-timing-dependent plasticity". It's basically like creating a circuit with flip-flops and logic gates at that point and claiming "yo, I got transistors to play doom bro". I don't know if that's what they did here .. if it is (someone find out?).. that's pretty damn lame. STDP produces a deterministic behavior. Either way, the cells have no idea they're playing Doom the same as a clock has no idea what time it is.
Relative (Score:4, Funny)
I learned to play doom in less than a week but I had the benefit of lots of chips. And soda.
I don't know why (Score:2)
But this really unnerves me. Hate to think where this tech will go long term. Best case cool computers worst case flesh robots made from the poor?
Re: (Score:2)
"flesh robots made from the poor" - that made my skin crawl when I read it. LOL Yikes.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a lot easier to just grow em on a lab than going all the effort of cracking skulls and re-training and all that.
Check the The Thought Emporium youtube channel, he's growing his neurons "at home", and his goal is actually to make exactly what this study did.
fuck (Score:1)
i still haven't learned
So on top of electricity (Score:1)
this device presumably needs temperature control, consumable chemicals, and strict biosecurity protocols in order to turn into a mass of goo*.
This doesn't seem like better. It seems like gee whiz in the same way a [1]cat piano [wikipedia.org] is gee whiz.
*I'd have said "in order to not grow intelligent life" but that would be one witticism too many in this context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ
Don't (Score:1)
Don't create the torment nexus. PLEASE stop creating the torment nexus.
Re: Don't (Score:2)
Are you referring to berserker mode
Horrors (Score:2)
Oh boy! Man made horrors beyond my comprehension!
Re: (Score:2)
It didn't know it was playing Doom, it was simply trying to communicate "KILL MEEEEEEE!"
Re: (Score:1)
Reminded me of the ending of "The Fly". The original, never saw the re-make.