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Biological intelligence

DishBrain plays Pong and promises more

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 5, pages 568–569 (2023)Cite this article

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An in vitro biological system of cultured brain cells has learned to play Pong. This feat opens up an avenue towards the convergence of biological and machine intelligence.

Technical innovations are often inspired by nature, with a powerful example being the ongoing contributions of neuroscience to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Recent analyses of human and animal neural networks have underlined their superiority over artificial neural networks in terms of external interaction, functional flexibility and energy efficiency1. To harness this potential, there are growing efforts to use living biological neural networks directly in tasks normally reserved for AI. In December 2022, a platform, the DishBrain system, was developed to study biological neural networks in vitro. The setup uses a high-density multielectrode array to interface with human and mouse cortical neurons for both input and output. This device was implemented in a simulated Pong game environment to induce biological intelligence2.

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Fig. 1: DishBrain uses human and mouse brain cells to learn to play a game of Pong through a microelectrode array as the interface.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by US National Institutes of Health grants R01CA237267, R01EB032716 and R01EB031885.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Albany Medical College, Albany, NY, USA

    Joshua Goldwag

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering, Biomedical Imaging Center, Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

    Ge Wang

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  1. Joshua Goldwag
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  2. Ge Wang
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Correspondence to Ge Wang.

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Goldwag, J., Wang, G. DishBrain plays Pong and promises more. Nat Mach Intell 5, 568–569 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00666-w

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