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Have you ever played a video game that you thought was impossible? Think Dark Souls or Cuphead levels of frustration. Now imagine if you didn’t have hands. Or eyes. Or ears. Or a fully-developed brain.
Turns out, you don’t need all that much to learn how to play video games decently enough. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Neuron, researchers from biotechnology firm Cortical Labs say they were able to teach a cluster of brain cells in a petri dish to play the 1970s classic Pong—or at least, an alternative version of it where it played against itself with one paddle.
The system, delightfully dubbed DishBrain, is made of neurons in a petri dish connected to a computer. This set up would deliver electrical feedback to the cells indicating whether or not the in-game paddle was hitting the ball. As the neurons moved the paddle to hit the ball, they would send spikes of electrical signals back to the computer.
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