Science & Technology

Scientists have trained a bowl of goo to play the video game Pong

By T.K. Randall
August 23, 2024 ·  3 comments

Image Credit: YouTube / New Scientist / University of Reading In a peculiar experiment that sounds like something out of the opening scene of a science-fiction horror movie from the 1950s, scientists at the University of Reading connected a bowl full of goo to a computer to learn more about the workings of biological neural networks - an analog for actual biological consciousness.

The substance - an ionic electroactive polymer hydrogel - is reactive to electricity and when a current passes through it, it swells and stretches - mimicking the way the human brain forms connections.

To make it possible for the goo to play Pong - a simple video game in which a bat moves up and down the screen to hit a ball - the hydrogel was covered with two sets of electrodes, one to stimulate the goo and the other to record its movements.

"To induce emergent memory functions, the hydrogel must be able to influence actions within an environment," the scientists behind the experiment wrote."The change in environment as a result of those actions must feed back to the hydrogel, leading to changes in actions and memory behavior."

"To construct this closed loop and quantify the effect of memory, a suitable activity is required."

Remarkably, over time, the goo was able to improve its ability to play the game effectively.

That's not all, either, as the team is planning to teach it ever more complex tasks in the future.

Skeptics of this whole experiment needn't worry, though, as there's no chance at all that the goo will escape the lab and run amok on the streets... at least not yet anyway.


Source: Gizmodo | Comments (3)

Tags: Pong