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† Only one generation left before we all get killed by skinjobs evolved from toasters.
Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom
A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom. Australian biotech outfit Cortical Labs has shown off its CL1 "biological computer" controlling the classic 1993 shooter using roughly 200,000 living human neurons grown on a …
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Sunday 8th March 2026 19:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 200,000 Neurons
Mea Culpa ... Another Political comment !!!
I take your point BUT I am smart enough not to ignore things or look the other way because 'unintended consequences' are currently stacking up rapidly !!!
In the US of A 'Everything' is now a 'political comment'.
What you had for breakfast or what colour your socks are or even which side of the street you live on !!!
As things are in the US of A, politics is somewhat important to everyone BUT especially if you live 'outside' the US of A ...
It may help you to decide if you are being bombed today or tomorrow !!!
All the war-crazed idiots (Putin, Herr Trump & Netanyahu) should be called out as much as possible, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that not ALL the world wants to kill everyone who is NOT of 'my tribe' !!!
Eventually another World War will come ... we should not be trying so hard to 'run towards it' ... because the next one will really hurt !!!
I marvel at & appreciate all the things that man managed to produce when NOT at war and wonder if any of it will still exist in 500 years and more importantly if there will be anyone left who can afford to care about the loss !!!
:)
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Sunday 8th March 2026 21:30 GMT retiredFool
Re: Nothing new
Interesting, never got a craving for baked taters for that episode. In college my roomie and I got to the point we could identify which episode in seconds of the beginning. We made a a game out of it. And weirdly on one of those oldies channels last night they ran the episode with the blobs of goo that would attach to the body and make you mad. Spock got hit with one, and of course even half mad discovered it was light that killed them. But the episode planet scenes was done at a company I worked at in LA, TRW. Most shots were in/of E1, which was the big shot building, but one shot was in the plaza of M5/R6. I had an office in that complex for a couple years. Great building.
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Monday 9th March 2026 00:45 GMT wub
Re: Nothing new
Yeah, I had a roommate in grad school who could correctly identify any of the "Golden 79" in the first few seconds just from the music in the soundtrack. I tested him a few times when he wasn't even in the same room as the TV. Around 1980. He didn't have DVDs or "oldies" TV channels or even cable TV to train from. He grew up when Star Trek was new, and had just seen the original episodes, and reruns of them that many times on bog standard broadcast TV.
Yikes...
Good guy, but yikes.
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Monday 9th March 2026 01:14 GMT Gene Cash
Re: Nothing new
> reruns of them that many times on bog standard broadcast TV.
Yup, can confirm... if ST had been as apparently popular when it was still running as when it was syndicated, we would have had 20 seasons instead of 3.
As it was, when you see the same 79 episodes 30 times each (mainly since they're the only interesting thing on the damn TV) then you learn to recognize them.
As a kid, I was always confused why the "The Gamesters of Triskelion" was being held on The Isle of Man.
(and now I'm the guy with a 4ft Playmobil Enterprise, and I even wrote an Android app to do the Bluetooth commands to operate it)
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Monday 9th March 2026 07:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Nothing new
I can still identify most 70s and 80s music from the first few beats - side effect of having been a DJ in those days (which was then all about keeping people dancing, not the self-glamorising trade it is now). I do miss the joys of fader switch driven cued up Technics SL1200-MK2 and the occasional spliced edit on a Revox B77 (the 'living room' variant of the A77).
:)
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Sunday 8th March 2026 21:13 GMT Ropewash
Internet pedantry commencing;
1 - Doom wasn't truly 3D. There was a Z axis, but it wasn't utilized as an input, nor was it able to allow overlapping floors on a map.
2 - A mouse was not used for game input, so the brain not knowing of the device wouldn't matter.
3 - Unrelated to the article, but given it can play Doom can it also map a non-soundblaster16 card in a way that the game can output to it?
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Monday 9th March 2026 15:56 GMT theOtherJT
Re: Internet pedantry commencing;
Doom ran perfectly well without one. The game engine draws a Z axis, but it doesn't really exist as such. If you fire at a wall right in front of you and that wall forms the side of an accessible column whereby you can stand on top of it, you'll hit whatever's up there. The hit-scan mechanism doesn't actually take any notice of "up" or "down" so you don't actually have any need to look that way. A lot of us played doom on machines that didn't have mice.
Quake on the other hand was a proper 3d engine and playing that without a mouse was challenging to say the least... although still possible. I vaguely recall having X and S mapped for look down and look up, jump on A, fire on space, and cycle weapon on D. Movement by arrow keys. We hadn't really standardized on WASD back then so this seemed reasonable at the time. Can't imagine trying to do it now.
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Sunday 8th March 2026 21:17 GMT DaveK23
This is largely bullshit.
I read the source code. The neurons aren't doing any of the real heavy lifting, like interpreting visual inputs. That's all done by the OpenCV library, which they then feed into a pre-trained GPT-style transformer. This boils it down to just eight signals, which are fed into the CL1 inputs. The CL1 returns three outputs each for move forward, backwards, left or right; four outputs each for rotate left and right; and three more that mean fire gun. So effectively the input signals are some linear combination of ‘enemy over here’, ‘enemy over there', ‘enemy dead ahead’ and ‘empty corridor ahead’; and the neurons are being trained to probabilistically decode these into the various possible actions in response. It’s not nothing, but it’s barely more complex than playing pong. (Also, did you watch their video? The pong bat was about two-thirds the height of the play field! I could probably do as well as their neurons with my eyes closed!)
The repository contains a pretty defensive set of FAQ, which basically implicitly admits that what the neurons are doing is just learning to decode a linear combination into a set of basis vectors. I also note that there is no peer-reviewed paper describing their work.
Overall, this is 99% hype and 1% actual innovation. Colour me distinctly unimpressed.
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Monday 9th March 2026 13:01 GMT Scotech
Re: This is largely bullshit.
Most living tissues will do pretty well if left in a nutrient bath that's being constantly refreshed, provided they're small and simple enough that the liquid can reach every cell and circulate reasonably effectively. That's all the body's circulatory system really does at the end of the day.
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Monday 9th March 2026 06:55 GMT Pascal Monett
"occasionally dying a lot"
Yeah, I remember doing that as well when I started playing Doom.
You can argue all you want about what the actual workload was for these cells, the fact remains that Science has now created a bunch of living neurons outside of a human body and can "train" them do do a specific job.
In a hundred years, we'll have 100 billion of those cells replicated across a million T-400s and Skynet will be a thing.
