This is one of the strangest things happening in tech right now. Elon Musk says it’s creepy. Scientists placed 200,000 human brain cells in a Petri dish and taught them to play Doom.

Scientists at a company called Cortical Labs have grown about 200,000 living human brain cells on a chip and taught them to play the classic shooter game Doom (actually a copyright-free clone called Freedoom that uses the Doom engine).

First, it reminds us that back in 2022 the same team grew mouse and human neurons on an electrode array and linked them to the simple game Pong.

The electrodes sent electrical signals to the neurons about where the ball was on the screen, and the neurons responded in a coordinated way so that the paddle could hit the ball back. That earlier result already showed that brain cells in a dish could learn to respond to feedback and “play” a game.

Now they have moved from Pong to Doom, which is much more complex because it is a 3D-style environment with enemies, attacks, and lots of action instead of just a ball and a paddle.

A Cortical Labs scientist, Alon Loeffler, says Pong was a simple one-to-one input–output problem (ball goes up, paddle goes up), but Doom requires handling many different things happening at once.

200,000 neurons sounds like a lot, but it is very small compared to the roughly 86 billion neurons in a full human brain.

Even with this small number of cells, the system manages to navigate Doom’s environment when given the right kind of stimulation and feedback.

However, it is not playing at a professional level: Loeffler says it is definitely not an e-sports champion and plays more like a total beginner who has never used a computer before. The cells often “die” in the game, but they show signs of learning over time, like being able to seek out enemies, shoot, and spin around.

Elon Musk called it “Creepy” in a comment to the X post about this story.

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