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Australian Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Doom on Silicon Chip
Researchers at Cortical Labs trained roughly 200,000 living human neurons to control the 1990s video game Doom. The cells, grown from donated blood stem cells, sit on a silicon chip that converts their electrical signals into game inputs.
May 31, 12:30 AM·1m read4 sources
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Australian researchers have trained clusters of living human brain cells to play the 1990s video game Doom. The neurons sit on a silicon chip that translates their electrical activity into game commands. Scientists at Cortical Labs in Melbourne developed the system, which they call a biological computer.
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How the System Works Each biological computer holds about 200,000 human brain cells grown from stem cells taken from blood donations. The cells form networks that respond to visual input from the game. Researchers send simplified game images to the chip. The neurons react with electrical signals that the system converts back into movement commands for the on-screen character.
The team says the neurons have learned basic navigation and shooting tasks inside the game. They describe the work as an early demonstration and say they are still exploring the limits of what the cells can do. The project combines living tissue with conventional computing hardware. The researchers note that the approach differs from traditional silicon-based artificial intelligence systems.
“Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game Doom and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing." — AFP, May 31, 2026 The experiments take place in a Physical Containment Level 2 laboratory. Scientists monitor the cells on culture plates while they process game data. No specific timeline for further applications has been released.”
