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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Rory Norris

A petri dish of human neurons has learned to play Doom: 'The cells play a lot like a beginner who's never seen a computer, and in fairness, they haven't'

Doom (1993) key art depicting Doom Guy shooting at hordes of demons clawing at him from below.

Doom is a cultural cornerstone, where every new piece of tech (gaming or otherwise) and every game is forced to somehow—no matter how impossible—run Doom. It's a test, and we've seen the 1993 classic on everything from a motherboard's BIOS, old potatoes, a Lego brick, to a home pregnancy test, and even Doom running inside Doom. Honestly, I thought we'd hit the end of the runway. And then Cortical Labs, a tech startup which once grew living brain cells on a microchip to play Pong, returned to train these neurons to play Doom. In retrospect, after they played Pong, it was the only logical next step, wasn't it?

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