With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they'd built, Brainoware responded to those signals, and changes occurred in its neural networks. According to the researchers, this result suggests that the hybrid system did process information, and could perhaps even perform computing tasks without supervision. Guo and his colleagues then attempted to see if Brainoware could perform any useful tasks. In one test, they used Brainoware to try to solve mathematical equations.

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.'

Doctors believe artificial intelligence is now saving lives, after a major advancement in breast cancer screenings. A.I. is detecting early signs of the disease, in some cases years before doctors would find the cancer on a traditional scan. A team of researchers in Australia has been awarded more than $403,000 in federal funding to merge human brain cells with artificial intelligence. Melbourne's Monash University, which led the research into growing human brain cells on silicon chips, said in a release that the money came from the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants Program. The program was led by Turner Institute Associate Professor Adeel Razi and is a collaboration with start-up Cortical Labs.

Balls of human brain cells grown in a dish, known as organoids, have been linked to computers and used to solve mathematical equations. In a paper posted online before peer review, Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington and his colleagues claim to have created "living AI hardware that harnesses the computation power of 3D biological neural networks in a brain organoid". The paper states that "Brainoware", as they call it, can learn from training data and that their experiments show it …

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.

The study of tiny spheres of human brain cells grown in a dish, known as organoids, is currently one of the hottest fields in neuroscience, with the potential to shed light on human brain development and neurological conditions. Now, computer scientists are hooking them up to electrodes in the hope of creating a new kind of artificial intelligence, based on biology. Brett Kagan at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, says his firm's first goal for the emerging idea of "organoid intelligence" is …

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.

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.

Human Brain Cells In A Dish Learned How To Play The Game Pong, Did It Faster Than A.I. Earlier this week it was reported that a robot took just 90 minutes to learn how to play the game of ping pong in one example of just how far artificial intelligence has come. However, another scientific breakthrough revealed this week shows that the human brain is still superior to A.I. in at least one area: playing the video game PONG. Researchers at Cortical Labs discovered that hundreds of thousands of human brain cells in a dish can not only learn how to play PONG, they can improve their performance faster than artificial intelligence, reports New Scientist. We think it's fair to call them cyborg brains," said Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs. The "DishBrains" being created by Kagan and his colleagues each consist of between about 800,000 and 1 million living brain cells – roughly equivalent to a cockroach brain, says Kagan. Some contain mouse cells taken from embryonic brains while others contain human brain cells derived from stem cells. The cells are grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both stimulate the cells and read their activity. To simulate a simplified version of Pong with no opponent, the firing of electrodes on the left or right of one array tell the mini-brain – the paddle – whether the ball is to its left or right. The frequency of the signals indicates closeness. Specific patterns of activity across the neurons are interpreted as the paddle moving left or right. The computer responds to this activity, and the feedback via the electrodes allows the mini-brains to learn how to control the paddle. "We often refer to them as living in the Matrix," said Kagan. "When they are in the game, they believe they are the paddle." While these brains in a dish aren't better PONG players than A.I. or real people, they do learn faster than AIs. "The amazing aspect is how quickly it learns, in 5 minutes in real time," said Kagan. "That's really an amazing thing that biology can do." Karl Friston of the University College London said about the research, "In my opinion, it is a quantum leap forward.

Hundreds of thousands human brain cells grown in a petri dish have found a new meaning in life – they spend the day playing the retro videogame Pong. Australian scientists at Cortical Labs taught the cells to play in just five minutes, which is faster than artificial intelligence (AI) that picks up the game after 90 minutes. The system, called'DishBrain,' is comprised of brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both stimulate the cells. To teach the mini-brains Pong, the team used a single player version of the game and sent electrical signals to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is. The brain would then fire off neurons to move the paddle back and forth according to the location of the ball. Hundreds of thousands human brain cells grown in a petri dish have found a new meaning in life – they spend the day playing the retro videogame Pong.