What video game did scientists teach brain cells to play?

A research team out of Melbourne, Australia, has successfully taught lab-grown brain cells to play the 1970s video game Pong. In the game, which they chose for its simplicity, two players hit a ball back and forth between them using paddles.

They used two different kinds of cells in the experiment: human brain cells derived from stem cells and mice cells derived from embryonic cells. The cells were placed into a multi-electrode array the team devised called the DishBrain. The DishBrain senses cell activity and stimulates the cells, so it could give them feedback on whether they were hitting the ball.

After about five minutes, the cells began to learn how to play the game, and their performance improved with longer rallies and fewer instances of being aced. Though they never played against each other, the human cells were able to maintain rallies longer than the mice cells.

According to Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer of biotech startup Cortical Labs and a member of the team, the next step is to “get them ‘drunk’ and see if they play the game more poorly.”