Yes, that headline is accurate. Somewhere out there in the world there’s a petri dish full of human brain bits that’s able to play seminal 1993 shooter Doom. No, we don’t know what to do with that information either.
This disquieting news was made possible by the Cortical Labs and their CL1 computer—commercially available, by the way, if you’ve got $35,000 (about P2.09 million) to spare—which uses human brain cells on a computer chip to send and receive electrical signals. A bit like a brain does.
According to Dr. Alon Loeffler, the team of scientists working on the project “needed to translate the digital world of Doom into the biological language of neurons, which is electricity."
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Needed is a strong word, but nevertheless the team managed it. It’s not the first time they’ve trained a synthetic brain-microchip hybrid to play a game, either, having successfully taught the CL1 to play Pong in 2022.
“Doom was much more complex [than Pong],” Dr. Brett Kagan explains in Cortical Lab’s video about the project. "Doom is chaos, it's 3D, it has enemies, it has an explorable environment, and it's hard."
Quite understandably, it isn’t especially good at blasting hellspawn with a shotgun.
Doom has become a strange kind of hardware benchmark over the last thirty years. The challenge is to find the most basic or rudimentary electronic device that can run it, with items including a pair of earbuds, an analog oscilloscope, and this person’s office phone all pulling off the feat.
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
