Posted on 03/07/2026 9:33:37 AM PST by yesthatjallen
A couple of years ago, a company called Cortical Labs released a video that showed a simplified version of Pong being played by a culture of human neurons in a Petri dish. The idea that a bunch of neurons in a dish can do anything is impressive enough, but it turns out that things have gotten significantly crazier since then, because the company has now managed to get a similar culture of neurons to play Doom.
In a very slick marketing video, the company demonstrates “real neuron gameplay”: Doom running on its CL-1 neural computing system, a microchip upon which 200,000 human neurons are mounted in something called a “multi-electrode array.” (For comparison, while the exact number of neurons in an average human brain remains the subject of some debate, it’s in the order of tens of billions—which really just reinforces how astonishingly powerful and complex our own brains are.)
Anyway, this video is wild—and it just gets wilder as various company representatives explain exactly what’s going on.
First, the chip isn’t running Doom; it’s playing Doom. Or, to be more accurate, various elements of the on-screen data are being mapped to patterns of electric stimuli, which are then transmitted to the neurons. The neurons respond to these stimuli with signals of their own, which control the on-screen character’s actions: “If the neurons fire in a specific pattern, Doomguy shoots. If they fire in another pattern, he moves to the right. And so on.”
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
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We’ll probably go through an extended integration phase. Cyberpunk stuff.
Tech like this will be the interfacing for us to graft on additional senses/capabilities.
Eventually, either our tech will become indistinguishable from biology, or the other way around.
This need not be a bad thing, but knowing humans... Some jackass is gonna TRY to do something bad.
Two by two. Hands of Blue.
Everything is energy in one form or another.
Consciousness is far more than just energy as it is very complex.
Never saw a minute. Just got my DVD set plus the movie. Looking forward to it.
After some Doom, would this process tend to make one, say, vote for Horizontal?
bfl
This is impressive.
But one has to wonder if this is scaleable.
There's not enough brain there to actually perceive a threat. 200,000 neurons is nothing compared to the 86 billion in our heads.
They said it was trained using rewards.
Input A gets an output B response.
But where will I wager my Quatloos?
Regards,
Or to post in broken sentences.
Regards,
One detail worth noting: among Cortical Labs’ investors is In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Both the National Science Foundation and DARPA have also invested millions of dollars in organoid-based biocomputing in recent years.
Oh, no, that was more of a comic implication, as in, why can’t it be both?
Oh, okay.
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