{"id":476166,"date":"2026-05-31T13:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T13:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/476166\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T13:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T13:38:08","slug":"australian-researchers-teach-brain-cells-to-play-doom-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/476166\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian researchers teach brain cells to play ‘Doom’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing.<\/p>\n

It’s the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system.<\/p>\n

Each so-called “biological computer” contains around 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations.<\/p>\n

Having mastered the simple computer game “Pong”, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball across a screen, the brain cells have moved on to bigger things.<\/p>\n

Initially, the neurons were at the “level of a beginner who’s never played a video game before,” Alon Loeffler, Cortical Labs’ senior application scientist, told AFP.<\/p>\n

“Doom” involves a chaotic 3D game-world where the user is required to explore its surroundings and dispatch enemies – no easy task for a clump of cells.<\/p>\n

\"In
\nThe human neurons can be taught to play<\/p>\n

“They were walking into walls a lot, shooting the walls, turning around, doing funny things like that,” Mr Loeffler said.<\/p>\n

“And then eventually they started targeting the enemies more regularly and correctly.”<\/p>\n

It’s not the cleanest execution, however. One demon takes several attempts to slaughter, with shots fired in multiple directions before the target is hit.<\/p>\n

But the mind-bending research proves the neurons can adapt to stimuli in real time and complete goal-directed learning, Cortical Labs say.<\/p>\n

‘Scratching the surface’<\/p>\n

The researchers converted the digital environment in “Doom” into patterns of electrical signals the neurons on the chip could understand.<\/p>\n

When an enemy appears, specific electrodes stimulate the neurons on the special chip called a CL1, causing them to react.<\/p>\n

Different patterns of neuron activity produce specific responses, such as firing the gun or moving left or right.<\/p>\n

Researchers monitor the electrical activity of the neurons from a computer screen connected to the CL1, represented by thousands of tiny dots.<\/p>\n

From this data, the team adjusts their input to influence and train the neuron’s activity.<\/p>\n

The CL1 isn’t limited to computer games — the chip can be coded to perform a range of applications, from drug screening to AI-like machine learning.<\/p>\n

“We are just scratching the surface of what these neural cultures can achieve when integrated in systems like our CL1,” said chief scientific and operations officer Brett Kagan.<\/p>\n

“Our neural cultures have been explored for a variety of tasks,” he said — everything from “robotics, real-time learning tasks that are similar to AI, as well as healthcare, medicine, disease modelling, drug screening and even personalised medicine”.<\/p>\n

– Not ‘wacky science’ –<\/p>\n

Mr Kagan describes the CL1 chip as “a more sustainable and more powerful form of intelligence”.<\/p>\n

The human brain runs on an estimated 20 watts of power, a level of efficiency that silicon computing and artificial intelligence have not yet been able to replicate.<\/p>\n

\"In
\nThe systems could be integrated with AI<\/p>\n

While it’s “not aimed to replace what AI is doing” it’s intended to “give us abilities that we’ve never had before”, Mr Kagan said.<\/p>\n

The cells have a six-month lifespan and aren’t yet capable of producing consistent, programmable results.<\/p>\n

But analysts say the project’s value could lie in its more sustainable power consumption compared to regular chips.<\/p>\n

“We need better ways to manage that power envelope and get higher levels of efficiency,” William Keating, CEO of semiconductor research company Ingenuity, said.<\/p>\n

“This isn’t wacky science or some bunch of scammers. This is real science and it’s making real progress.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-476166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}