shades fills you in

Aussie scientists taught a petri dish of brain cells to play Pong, the classic 1970s Atari game. It’s a clump of 800,000 cells that learned to play Pong in 5 minutes

Here’s a video of the brain playing Pong -- it’s just the video game screen, but it’s still pretty cool

Here’s how it worked: The scientists hooked up the neurons to a computer using an electrical grid, and the grid told the brain if it missed or hit the ball via “spikes” in electricity. The bigger the spike, the closer the paddle was to the ball

The chief scientist of the project, Dr. Brett Kagan, says it’s kind of like a computer but not really. It’s a biological device that can process information, and it definitely shows signs of intelligence

The lab says the minibrain meets the classical definition of sentience -- it’s “responsive to sensory impressions through adaptive internal processes”

But the principal scientist doesn’t think it’s sentient. Yes, it’s learning, but that’s not the only thing that matters. The dishbrain is most similar to a bug brain, and we don’t think bugs are sentient

Even so, the lab is taking steps to make sure they don’t accidentally create a conscious brain. That would be a serious ethical dilemma -- BBC

NPR says Bio-Intel is seriously flexible. If you were in somebody else’s house, you could figure out how to make a cup of tea. A synthetic biointelligent brain could too. But even the smartest supercomputer would have a really hard time

And it’s so much faster than AI, says New Scientist -- to get to a Pong proficiency level, a strong AI needs 5000 volleys. It only took DishBrain 15!

But Cosmos Magazine says pump the brakes -- be careful with terms like “brain” and “bio-intelligence”. We have 86 million neurons, this thing has just 800k. It’s cool, but who knows what’ll happen. For now, AI rules

What does the future hold? For the Aussie lab, the next experiment will involve getting DishBrain drunk -- they want to see if it gets impaired the same way animals do