Since its debut in 1993, the video game Doom has informally served as a benchmark for new technologies – if it can run Doom, it’s generally considered a functional computer. Now, a scientific experiment has taken that idea into uncharted territory. Researchers have successfully enabled 200,000 human neurons grown on a microchip to learn to interact with the game, representing one of the most unique examples of biological computing to date.
How Neurons Grown on a Chip Learned to Play Doom
The core of this experiment lies in an emerging field known as biological computing: a research area exploring the employ of real neurons cultivated in a lab and connected to microchips capable of sending and receiving electrical impulses. The result is a hybrid system where traditional hardware acts as an interface while neurons process stimuli and generate responses – a model some researchers view as a complement to, or even a partial alternative to, conventional artificial intelligence.
To demonstrate the capabilities of this system, researchers turned to Doom, the 1993 first-person shooter that has long been used as an informal stress test for computing devices. In this case, the game was adapted so that images and events were translated into electrical signals sent to the neuron culture, while the electrical activity generated by the neurons was interpreted as actions within the game. While the system is still far from human-level performance, the experiment demonstrated that neurons can respond to stimuli and learn basic interaction patterns, such as shooting enemies, validating the concept of using biological neural networks as part of experimental computing systems.
This study isn’t simply a biotechnological curiosity; researchers point out that such systems could have practical applications in the near future. Biological computing may assist study how neural networks learn and adapt in controlled environments, potentially improving both AI models and neurological research. However, these advances also raise an emerging ethical debate: while the cultures contain isolated human neurons lacking consciousness or perception – it’s not a “living” brain – some experts caution that the development of increasingly complex hybrid systems poses new questions about the limits and regulation of this emerging technology.
In any case, the experiment presents a striking image: living human cells interacting with a video game created more than three decades ago. What began as a simple tech meme – checking if something can run Doom – has now grow a curious scientific demonstration of how far the convergence of biology and computing can go. We are still far from creating computers with key components entirely composed of living tissue, but work like this points to a future where the boundaries between brain and machine could be much more blurred than we imagine.
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The Doom phenomenon also came to Super Nintendo thanks to laborious conversion work and the use of the Super FX chip. Although it came with almost all the levels and enemies, the version had different and curious limitations such as the fact that the enemies always looked at the player since the console could not show the rotations on the screen.
