Scientists Taught a Petri Dish of Brain Cells to Play Doom

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

In 2022, the team at Cortical Labs taught 800,000 brain cells in a petri dish connected to a computer how to play the 1970s game Pong. Now, years later, the same team is leveling up as they claim their CL1 system is the "world's first code deployable biological computer," and is able to play Doom. "Pong was much simpler. There was a direct relationship: The ball went up, the paddle went up. It was a direct input, output relationship," the research team explained in a YouTube video. "Doom was much more complex."

Posted by lamplighter at 03:25 PM | 3 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry |

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... With its own active Reddit thread and booming fan base, the first-person shooter simulation game requires players to slay their opponents as they traverse through its universe. Previous iterations of the game featured pixelated rendering, while newer versions show more complex characters and landscapes. But translating a game made for human eyes was a challenge no matter the pixels.

"Doom is chaos. It's 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore its environment and it's hard," Cortical Labs said. "To bridge that gap, we needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity." ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-03-10 03:26 PM | Reply

... A biotechnology startup is developing experimental data centers powered by living human brain cells in a radical approach that could eventually reshape the future of computing. According to a report by Bloomberg, Australia-based Cortical Labs is building small data centers that run on lab-grown neurons placed on silicon chips, an innovation that researchers believe could one day challenge traditional processors used in artificial intelligence systems. ...

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-03-10 03:30 PM | Reply

Petri dish players always camp

#3 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2026-03-10 03:32 PM | Reply