Biological Breakthrough
An Australian biotech startup taught living human brain cells to play the 1993 video game Doom, marking a significant advancement in biological computing.
Context
In 2022, Cortical Labs made headlines when it taught clusters of brain neurons to play Pong (1972). The company’s device – the CL1 – contains approximately 200,000 living human brain neurons attached to a silicon chip and kept alive with nutrients. The company marketed the CL1 as the “world’s first code deployable biological computer” when it launched in March 2025.
Learning to Play
Last week, Cortical Labs announced that the neurons learned to play Doom in less than a week, a dramatic improvement over the 18 months it took to teach them Pong.
