An Australian company called Cortical Labs has developed a computer powered by lab-grown human brain cells, Gizmodo reports. The computer, known as CL1, is described as the world's first "code deployable biological computer" and is now available for pre-order -- for a price in the 35,000 range. Don't want to buy your own device? The company also offers "Wetware-as-a-Service" via which you can rent bio-computer processing power via the cloud. CL1 consists of lab-grown neurons grown on a glass-and-metal electrode array.

A team of Australian scientists collaborating across academia and private industry have just received a three-year grant to weaponize their work growing brain cell cultures that are capable of communicating with machines. Over the past two years, the team has already succeeded in teaching a brain cell culture of approximately 800,000 neurons how to successfully play the 1970s video game Pong from its Petri dish. The $600,000 grant was awarded by the Australian government's military and intelligence communities and will be managed by the Australian Research Council. 'The beautiful and pioneering aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations: the feedback,' as one of the Pong project's co-researchers, theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston, put it last October. 'And crucially,' Professor Friston added, the brain culture has been given, 'the ability to act on their world.'

Researchers from John Hopkins University and Cortical Labs suggest that it's time to create a new type of computer that uses biological components. They believe that biological computers could outperform electronic computers in certain applications and use significantly less electricity. The future of computing includes biology says an international team of scientists. The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, who recently led development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learned to play Pong. In an article published on February 27 in the journal Frontiers in Science, the team outlines how biological computers could surpass today's electronic computers for certain applications while using a small fraction of the electricity required by today's computers and server farms.

It's the classic table tennis-themed video game that tasks players with moving a paddle vertically across a screen to hit a ball. And now even human brain cells grown in a lab have mastered Pong. Researchers from Melbourne-based start-up, Cortical Labs, have shown for the first time that 800,000 brain cells can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case, Pong. The findings suggest that even brain cells in a petri dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behaviour over time. 'This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience – by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing – opens up new discovery possibilities which will have far-reaching consequences for technology, health, and society,' said Dr Adeel Razi, an author of the study.

A journalist asks: "What technological advance allowed such huge performance gains?" The chief executive replies: "We created a new biological chip using lab-grown human neurons. These biological chips are better than silicon chips because they can change their internal structure, adapting to a user's usage pattern and leading to huge gains in efficiency." Another journalist asks: "Aren't there ethical concerns about computers that use human brain matter?" Although the name and scenario are fictional, this is a question we have to confront now.

The year is 2030 and we are at the world's largest tech conference, CES in Las Vegas. A crowd is gathered to watch a big tech company unveil its new smartphone. The CEO comes to the stage and announces the Nyooro, containing the most powerful processor ever seen in a phone. The Nyooro can perform an astonishing quintillion operations per second, which is a thousand times faster than smartphone models in 2020. It is also ten times more energy-efficient with a battery that lasts for ten days.

What do you call a network of neurons connected to electrodes that learn to play Pong? Even the scientists behind the experiment don't know how to describe their creation. But the ethical questions that arise out of this fusion of neurons and silicon, are plenty. Brian Patrick Green takes a first shot at articulating them and suggests this might be the real future of Artificial Intelligence. On December 3, 2021 the Australian biological computing startup, Cortical Labs, released a pre-print article stating that it had turned a network of hundreds of thousands of neurons into a computer-like system capable of playing the video game Pong.

Melbourne (Australia) The human brain is a true miracle machine. It is always active, can solve complex tasks, is capable of learning and has the ability to process several streams of information at once. For this reason, researchers have tried to make biological nerve cells usable for computer science. According to the scientists at Cortical Labs, they recently made a breakthrough. They taught microscopic brains grown in Petri dishes to play the computer game Pong.

An ongoing study at Cortical Labs in Australia demonstrates how I am Cultured neurons To manage Learn to play pong Faster than Artificial intelligence, Despite lower results than these in the long run. Lessons learned, brain tissue cells cultured in petri foods, through a system called "DishBrain", create a kind of autonomous brain mass that puts human stem cells on top of the microelectronic matrix and builds brain cells. These cells receive electrical inputs through electrodes and were tested in the style of the popular Atari game in the early 70s. Research has shown that these brain cells learn to play and play much faster than an artificial intelligence system: based on the data, cultured neurons learn to react and "play". However, it is also true that artificial intelligence is more accurate than brain cells.

Researchers have placed networks of neurons into dishes, placed them into what amounts to a simple version of The Matrix, and found they can learn Pong faster than an AI. As reported by New Scientist, researchers at Cortical Labs explained that they've grown groups of human neurons into organoid mini-brains (a process also being used to attach Neanderthal brain cells to crab robots) and placed on micro-electrode interfaces. Those interfaces pulse with electricity, used to effectively convince the mini-brains that they are the paddles inside a game of single-player Pong. Have you played Pong [1972]? "We often refer to them as living in the Matrix," explained chief scientific officer Brett Kagan. Within that virtual game world, the neurons can begin to move those paddles, using them to stop Pong's relentless bouncing ball from passing by them.