Scientists get Doom running on chips powered by 200,000 human neurons, and those clever little cells are playing it too

You’ve seen Doom run on a McDonald’s cash register. You’ve seen it run on a lawnmower. You’ve seen it run on Google’s search bar. Now you can see it running on some lab-grown brain cells fused to a microchip. Perhaps a glimpse into our distant cyborg future, the company behind some of the world’s most advanced biological computers has got a load of them not only running id Software’s iconic FPS game, but actually playing it. Not very well, mind you.

This is certainly one of the wildest ‘here’s Doom running on X’ stories I’ve come across, and it’s been made possible by Cortical Labs. The company specializes in wetware (computers made using organic material) and is notable for being the first to create a “code-deployable” system called the CL-1. If you’ve got a good reason to buy one, Cortical Labs will happily sell you a unit for a cool $35,000.

I’ll do my best not to get in the scientific weeds here, but the CL-1 basically works by placing roughly 200,000 lab-grown human neurons onto a silicon chip, and then plugging that chip into what it calls a biOS (biological intelligence operating system). This “runs a simulated world and sends information directly to the neurons about their environment. As the neurons react, their impulses affect their simulated world.” The company also has a cloud network powered by loads of CL-1s, and people can remotely deploy code into this wetware cloud to put those neurons to the test.

A few years ago, Cortical Labs managed to train these neurons to play Pong – about as straightforward a game as you can get. However, maneuvering through the original Doom is a different kind of challenge entirely. With the help of an independent researcher called Sean Cole, the company managed to get Doom running on its own API by translating every aspect of the game into the kind of electrical impulses that neurons understand. Once it had done that, they could fire up a CL-1 and watch it try to play it.

“We showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” says Dr Brett Kagan. “This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning. But it took us over 18 months with our original hardware and software to get this to work. And Pong was much simpler. There was a direct relationship: the ball went up, the paddle went up. It was a direct input-output relationship. Doom was much more complex. Doom is chaos. It’s 3D, it has enemies, [the player] needs to explore its environment, and it’s hard.”

Ok, converting Doom into electricity to get it to run on some neurons sounds plausible enough, but are they actually playing the game? Aiming? Trying to beat Doom?

“Yes, they’re receiving information, they’re sending commands to move their character around, they’re able to find enemies and shoot,” Kagan explains. “Is it an esports champion? Absolutely not. Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer. And in all fairness, they haven’t. But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.”

While this is pretty impressive (and not just when compared to a lawnmower) my future tech anxiety is flaring up big time right now. I’m already fretting about sentient, all-powerful AI, can we chill with the cyborg microchips learning how to shoot?