Scientists Taught 200,000 Human Neurons How to Play Doom

One of the biggest tests of a hardware hacker’s skills is their ability to get Doom running on resource-constrained and obscure computing platforms like vapes, smart thermostats, and even toothbrushes. But now the team at Cortical Labs has taken this challenge in a new direction. Rather than focusing on the hardware that runs Doom, they used their own rather odd hardware platform to actually play the game — as in controlling the on-screen action.

The hardware platform in question is the Cortical Labs CL1, which is a biological computer powered by actual human neurons — the cells that the brain is made of. That kind of changes the definition of a “neural network,” huh? Strange as it may seem, there is nothing Frankenstein-ish going on here. The team harvests adult blood and skin stem cells, then induces them to become neurons.

To teach this biological computer to play Doom, its multi-electrode array chip containing 200,000 living human neurons was stimulated by electrical pulses that correspond with what is taking place in the game. These stimuli were paired with appropriate responses (e.g., move, shoot) so that the system could learn how to respond to different situations.

Given enough examples, the CL1 did learn to play Doom, although in a limited way. Focus was given to targeting and shooting enemies, so the computer can’t fully play the game yet. It can give some assistance with aiming and quick responses when enemies appear, however.

There is still a long way to go before the CL1 could fully play a game as complex as Doom. But considering that a human brain has around 86 billion neurons and the CL1 just 200,000, I’d say it’s not doing too bad for itself.