No.19
It’s the natural evolution of a well-established meme. We’ve seen the game being run on a satellite in space, on cells of E. coli bacteria, inside a candy bar, and even inside another copy of “Doom.”
“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Kagan explained in the video. “This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning. But it took us 18 months with our original hardware and software to get this to work. And Pong was much simpler.”
“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”
To adapt the 33-year-old video game and allow the CL1 to run it, the company had to “translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity,” Kagan explained.
By mapping the video feed from the game into “patterns of electrical stimulation,” the computer stimulated various areas of the neural culture, which reacted to that stimulation, appearing as spikes in the device’s activity monitor.
“If the neurons fire in a specific pattern, the Doom guy shoots,” Cortical Labs CTO David Hogan said in the video. “If they fire in another pattern, he moves right, and so on.”
Independent developer and collaborator Sean Cole then used Cortical Labs’ cloud platform to essentially teach the neurons how to play the game through the company’s Application Programming Interface (API) in “less than a week,” per Hogan.