title: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week
author: u/DarkWing
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/technology
published: 2026-02-27T21:29:05+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rgji4m/humanbraincellsonachiplearnedtoplaydoom/
word_count: 411
Link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/
Score: 4105 | Comments: 462 | Subreddit: r/technology
Top Comments
u/dregan (326 pts):
"What is my purpose?"
"You play Doom"
"Oh....sweet."
u/Broad_Mongoose4628 (291 pts):
it is wild how fast these cells pick it up compared to traditional machine learning. a buddy of mine mentioned they are even looking into using these for things like controlling prosthetic limbs because they adapt so much better to biological signals than standard chips do.
u/NoPossibility (917 pts):
Lame. Took me only a few minutes.
u/imaginary_num6er (317 pts):
Ah sweet, man made horrors beyond my comprehension.
u/fireeight (2166 pts):
Let's just not do this, alright?
u/shinelikethesun90 (54 pts):
Imagine waking up one day with no body, no context, and all you can experience is playing Doom. Happy birthday! And the E1M1 riff plays.
u/Skybreakeresq (432 pts):
40k is not supposed to be a road map yall. No servitors please.
u/qckpckt (84 pts):
Those brain cells have more leisure time that most Americans
u/Nowimhungry420 (50 pts):
I have no mouth and must scream.
u/AggressorBLUE (18 pts):
“BRB chat my 6090 is bleeding again”
u/sfled (61 pts):
Human brain cells on a chip
Fuck it, I am so done with this shit.
u/peilearceann (48 pts):
Soooo gamer afterlife is possible nice /s
u/rnilf (91 pts):
The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players. However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine learning systems
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Even so, the jump in capability is exciting, says Yoshikatsu Hayashi at the University of Reading, UK, and brings us significantly closer to useful real-world applications, such as controlling a robotic arm with biological computers, a task which Hayashi and his colleagues are attempting with a similar computer made from jelly-like hydrogel.
Step aside Silicon Valley, here comes Japan taking the title of Jelly Island?
u/FrenchDipsBeDrippin (15 pts):
That's pretty fucking horrific.
u/GranolaCola (13 pts):
Oh, hell yeah. These are the man made horrors beyond my comprehension than I’ve been waiting for
u/wowlock_taylan (27 pts):
Why?
Insert Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park.
u/nonanonymoususername (30 pts):
You want the Matrix … that’s how you get the Matrix … the power thing was bullshit for the Movies … originally people were used for processing power
u/omegadirectory (240 pts):
They're going to keep adding neurons and making it play more complex games, until one day we have to decide if they made a conscious human mind or not.
I used to hate the "man should not play god" argument but these MFers are playing god and they should not do it.
u/theoort (21 pts):
Human brain cells on a chip, eh?
u/stompinstinker (10 pts):
Do they have any ethics? This is the kind of thing that they would have your head for in Dune or Foundation.
u/drhon1337 (6 pts):
Seems like the source code was released on GitHub - https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron
u/simulated-souls (6 pts):
Looking into it, the system that plays Doom actually has 3 components:
1. An artificial neural network (ANN), similar to those that power LLMs and image classifiers, that encodes the frame into electrical signals
2. Brain cells that recieve the electrical signals and put out their own
3. Another ANN decoder that takes the cells' outputs and translates them into actions
It seems that the decoder is frozen(?), and the encoder is trained using reinforcement learning (the algorithm used to train ANNs on their own to play games like Doom). The brain cells don't seem to be directly "trained" in any way.
Frankly, I think that the encoder is doing most of the learning and the brain cells are functioning more like a randomly initialized fixed non-linear transformation. That is to say, the encoder is learning to play Doom under the constraint that its outputs are filtered through the brain cells. If the optimal policy is f(x), the brain cells inplement the function c(x), and the decoder implements the function d(x), then I think the encoder is learning the function c^-1 (d^-1 f(x))) without c(x) or d(x) really changing.
The code is here if you want to see for yourself: github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron
u/Zaic (12 pts):
what does that mean? are we all killers by design? why di it have to be doom? and not barbie adventures? would the brain just die if exposed to it?
u/ThinkChocolate (13 pts):
Faster than game journalists.
u/ThaLunatik (17 pts):
Next do MAGA rubes on Wolfenstein and see if they can learn that Nazis are bad.
u/memory-oob (5 pts):
Yknow this kind of dystopian shit needs to be downvoted to make sure it never sees the light of day
u/IncorrectAddress (7 pts):
Ok this is pretty awesome !
such as how the neurons know what is expected of them or how they can “see” the screen with no eyes.
This has to be some kind of natural pixel to position mapping based on positive or negative self-affirmation over tested actions ?