Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence

A dish of brain cells learned to play the 1970s video game Pong. The research could help computers become more intelligent

The novel achievement is part of an effort to understand how the brain learns, and how to make computers more intelligent.Brett Kagan

So Cortical Labs has been trying to understand how living brain cells acquire this sort of intelligence. And Kagan says the Pong experiment was a way for the company to answer a key question about how a network of brain cells learns to change its behavior: In the simplified version used in the experiment, there was a single paddle on the left side of the virtual table, and the ball would carom off the other sides until it evaded the paddle.

So the scientists tried to motivate the cells using electrical stimulation: a nicely organized burst of electrical activity if they got it right. When they got it wrong, the result was a chaotic stream of white noise.

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