Inspired by recent advancements in brain organoid systems, researchers have designed a simple hydrogel-electrode array that not only can "play" Pong, but improve its gameplay over time. Debuted by Atari in 1972, Pong is one of the most rudimentary but influential video games of all time. Although it just features two player paddles and a pixelated "ball" ricocheting between them, it still serves as a helpful benchmark for training not just artificial intelligence and neural networks, but also organoid intelligence, or OI. Grown from stem cells into rudimentary "brains," these OI systems may one day provide promising alternatives to more traditional hardware. But both AI and OI are extremely complex, costly industries--what if much simpler arrays could achieve similar results?

In the 1997 Robin Williams flick Flubber, an absent-minded professor creates a sentient ball of goo with incredible capabilities. Now, more than 25 years later, scientists have made a surprising discovery that could bring Flubber into the real world. Researchers from the University of Reading have created a non-living'hydrogel brain' which is capable of playing the video game Pong. Using a plate of electrodes hooked up to the classic game, the water-based jelly even managed to get 10 per cent better as it practised. While it might not be quite as bouncy as Robin Williams' invention, the researchers believe this breakthrough could change the future of artificial intelligence.

An inanimate glob of ion-laced jelly can play the computer game Pong and even improve over time. Researchers plan further experiments to explore whether it can handle more complex computations and hope it could eventually be used to control robots. Inspired by previous research that used brain cells in a dish to play Pong, Vincent Strong and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, decided to try playing the tennis-like game with an even simpler material. They took a polymer material containing water and laced it with ions to make it responsive to electrical stimuli. When electricity is passed through the material, those ions move to the source of the current, dragging water with them and causing the gel to swell.

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.

Next time you're getting your ass kicked at Fortnite or online chess, it could be at the metaphorical hands of a petri dish of brain cells. Scientists in Australia taught'sentient' cells to play Pong in just minutes, according to a paper published last week in journal Neuron. "What machines can't do is learn things very quickly," study leader Brett Kagan told AFP. "If you need a machine learning algorithm to learn something, it requires thousands of data samples. But if you ask a human, or train a dog, a dog can learn a trick in two or three tries." A mix of embryonic brain cells from mice and human neurons from adult stem cells were grown on top of electrodes that could deliver electric pulses. Rather than reward successful play with dopamine, which was too slow, the cells instead got regular and predictable electrical signals.

A dish of living brain cells has learned to play the 1970s arcade game Pong. About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the game's electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, a team reports in the journal Neuron. The novel achievement is part of an effort to understand how the brain learns, and how to make computers more intelligent. "We've made huge strides with silicon computing, but they're still rigid and inflexible," says Brett Kagan, an author of the study and chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. "That's something we don't see with biology." For example, both computers and people can learn to make a cup of tea, Kagan says.

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.

An artificial intelligence that mimics the operation of a standard computer within its neural network could speed up certain calculations. Researchers have used it to put an AI inside an AI and play Pong. If you want a computer to do something, you have to write code that manipulates bits of data. But if you code an AI-driven neural network, you have to train it with feedback before it can do anything.

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.

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.