In a groundbreaking development, a start-up company in Australia has successfully grown human mini-brains in petri dishes that can learn to play the classic video game Pong faster than artificial intelligence. Cortical Labs, the company behind the breakthrough, has created DishBrains consisting of 800,000 to one million neurons grown on a chip made of human brain stem cells on an electronic board with a microelectrode network. These neurons can be selectively stimulated with electromagnetic impulses, similar to a real brain. The DishBrains were trained to play a modified version of Pong, and they learned the game in just five minutes, compared to over an hour for artificial intelligence.
The DishBrains are a significant development in the field of using biological nerve cells for computing. Unlike a real brain, the mini-brains are grown on a chip and can be stimulated with electromagnetic impulses. The neurons can be trained to respond to specific stimuli, and the responses can be electronically read. The DishBrains were trained to play a modified version of Pong, and they learned the game in just five minutes, compared to over an hour for artificial intelligence. The DishBrains’ ability to learn quickly is due to the neuronal connections adapting to the problem, restructuring the brain to better handle the task.
Cortical Labs aims to make this technology commercially available within a few years. The company is not the only one working on this technology, as several start-ups under the Neu-ChiP project, funded by the European Union, are also working on integrating human brain stem cells into complex circuits to function as an artificial biological computer. The US-based company Koniku is also researching in this direction. The DishBrains’ ability to learn quickly could have significant implications for the future of computing, as it could lead to the development of more efficient and effective artificial intelligence systems.
