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Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence
Author: Jon Hamilton
October 14, 2022
Summary
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.”