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.'

Pong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it's true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic. The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle "paddle", moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain's response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball.

A new neuroscience study published this week in Neuron shows how a brain cell system grown in a laboratory dish called "DishBrain" learns to play in a computer game-world inspired by the classic arcade game of "Pong." "Harnessing the computational power of living neurons to create synthetic biological intelligence (SBI), previously confined to the realm of science fiction, may now be within reach of human innovation," wrote researchers affiliated with Cortical Labs, Monash University, The University of Melbourne, RMIT University, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and University College London who conducted the study. This is the first synthetic biological intelligence to show real-time adaptive behavior according to the researchers. To create DishBrain, researchers developed active neuronal cultures of roughly 800,000 cells consisting of cortical brain cells from laboratory mice embryos or human induced pluripotent stem cells (HiPSC) that were plated on high-density microelectrode arrays (HD-MEA) chips, then embedded in a simulated game inspired by the arcade game Pong. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (HiPSC) engineering is used to create models used for pharmaceutical drug discovery and the development of novel therapeutic treatments.

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.

Over the last decade, neural networks have become a trendy topic, ranging from image recognition to text generation and even video gameplay applications. On the other hand, these artificial neural networks are just mounds of math inside a computer. While they are capable of tremendous things, the technology has yet to demonstrate the ability to develop actual intelligence. Researchers at Cortical Labs, Australia propose that integrating neurons into digital systems to tap on their inherent intelligence could enable performance that would be impossible to achieve with silicon alone and provide insight into the biological origins of intelligence. The overall goal of the research is to use biological neurons' processing capability to build "synthetic biological intelligence."

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.

As a lover of tough single player games, I’m quite accustomed to getting my butt handed to me by AI, and usually not even a real one. I also happen to be the owner of a full sized human brain, and though it’s not without its problems, its ability to learn and change is usually why I eventually overcome those difficult in game challenges.So when I read about a few human brain cells in a petri dish that are already performing much better at a videogame than AI can, it’s concerning to me and my gaming future. New Scientist reports that a team in Australia has been growing these small puddles of brain and now one has learnt to play Pong, in fairly impressive time.Cortical labs is a company working on integrating biological neurons with your more traditional silicon based computing hardware. They grow brain cells on microelectronic arrays, so the cells can be stimulated. These hybrid chips are said to be able to learn and restructure themselves to get past problems, like stopping a sneaky ball that wants in your goal.According to Cortical labs, AIs typically take 90 minutes to learn Pong, whereas this ‘DishBrain’ (yes, that’s what it’s called) managed to have it down in five. Though the researchers do note that a good AI would still absolutely demolish the cells, once both properly trained.