“This was a major milestone, because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time goal directed learning.”
Cortical Labs mounted 200,000 living human neurons on a chip and taught them to play Doom in a week. The neurons receive the game’s visual feed as electrical stimulation patterns and learn to fire in specific patterns to shoot and move. An independent developer with no biocomputing experience got it working using Python. The neurons are not great at Doom. But they are learning in real time, adapting to stimuli, and making goal-directed decisions. That is not a gimmick. That is a biological computer doing exactly what biological computers do.