For some time now there has been one ultimate benchmark for whether or not something has a truly computerized central component: Does it play Doom? More than thirty years after iD Software released their 3D first-person shooter, it has been ported to seemingly everything from refrigerators to tractors to home pregnancy tests. And more often than not, they do indeed run Doom.
A few years ago an outfit in Australia called Cortical Labs, working with lab-grown human neural cells, coaxed a Petri dish of neurons into playing Pong. Which is about as rudimentary a video game as there can get. Almost immediately the company started getting asked the same question: Could their "brains on a chip" play Doom? Something that would require substantially more sensory input and calculation than simply moving a virtual paddle up and down. The real matter was, people didn't want to know if the neurons could run Doom. They wanted to know if it could play it with some semblance of a human being's participation in the game.
Lo and behold, Cortical Labs has done it.
A little high-tech box containing 200,000 human neurons is now playing Doom at Cortical Labs's facility. It's playing FreeDoom, which is a port of the original source code that iD released a long time ago. The classic imps, cacodemons and former humans aren't in the lab's version of the game - that would be trademark infringement - but it's still the same basic design and functionality. "Doomguy" is moving around in Doom's simulated 3D space and firing his weapons at the generic enemy targets, just as he would if it was a living person operating him.
Furthermore, the neurons are gradually learning the parameters of the game. They are getting better. One can only wonder what would happen if they got turned loose in the classic doom.wad game file and started discovering how to evade, and then shoot back at, the original in-game enemies running their now-primitive but back-in-the-day awesome programmed artificial intelligence.
This is a major step forward toward the development of true AI. If this kind of technology comes to migrate out of the lab and into industrial production, Lord only knows what kind of applications could come of it. Some good, and some... not so much. This is the sort of development that William Gibson wrote about in his novel Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer) forty years ago. It was kind of scary then and it's a bit scary now.
I guess there could be some benefit though. If you ever needed a more-than-silicon opponent to play Call of Duty against, there might be an ever-ready one sitting in a lab dish waiting to compete with. That might be a spinoff (albeit not an altogether comfortable one to have).
