MELBOURNE: Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the Nineties shooter “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons might be capable of.
It’s the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the brain’s network system.
Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells harvested from blood donations.
After mastering 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.
Initially, the neurons were at “the level of a beginner who has never played a video game before,” said Alon Loeffler, Cortical Labs’ senior application scientist. AFP.
“Doom” involves a chaotic 3D game world where the user is required to explore his surroundings and dispatch enemies – no easy task for a lump of cells.
“They were going into walls a lot, shooting the walls, flipping around, doing funny things like that,” Loeffler said.
“And then eventually they started targeting the enemies more regularly and accurately.”
However, it is not the cleanest execution. A demon takes several attempts to slaughter, with shots fired in multiple directions before hitting the target.
But the thought-provoking research proves that neurons can adapt to stimuli in real time and complete goal-directed learning, Cortical Labs says.
‘Craters in the surface’
The researchers converted the digital environment of “Doom” into patterns of electrical signals that the neurons on the chip could understand.
When an enemy appears, specific electrodes stimulate the neurons on the special chip called a CL1, causing them to react.
Different patterns of neuronal activity produce specific responses, such as firing the gun or moving left or right.
Researchers monitor the neurons’ electrical activity from a computer monitor connected to CL1, represented by thousands of tiny dots.
Based on this data, the team adjusts their input to influence and train the neuron’s activity.
CL1 is not limited to computer games – the chip can be coded to perform a range of applications, from drug screening to AI-like machine learning.
“We’re just scratching the surface of what these neural cultures can achieve when integrated into systems like our CL1,” said Chief Science and Operations Officer Brett Kagan.
“Our neural cultures have been explored for a variety of tasks,” he said – ranging from “robotics, real-time learning tasks similar to AI, as well as healthcare, medicine, disease modeling, drug screening and even personalized medicine”.
Not ‘mad science’
Kagan describes the CL1 chip as “a more sustainable and more powerful form of intelligence”.
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.
While it is “not intended to replace what AI is doing,” it is intended to “give us capabilities that 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 may lie in its more sustainable power consumption compared to regular chips.
“We need better ways to manage that current frame and get higher efficiency levels,” said William Keating, CEO of semiconductor research firm Ingenuity.
“This isn’t crazy science or a bunch of frauds. This is real science, and it’s making real progress.”
