Petri Dish Brain Learns Pong Faster than Traditional Computer AI

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The so-called DishBrains from Cortical Labs consist of 800,000 to one million neurons. Unlike a real brain, the brains are grown on a chip from human brain stem cells on an electronic circuit board with a microelectrode mesh. These neurons can be selectively stimulated with electromagnetic pulses, much like a real brain. Each impulse triggers a response from the neurons, and the responses can be read electronically.

...According to the researchers, it takes an artificial intelligence more than an hour to master Pong, depending on the processing power of the system used. A DishBrain, on the other hand, only needed about five minutes to learn the video game. This is because the neural connections have adapted to the problem – in other words, the brain has restructured to better handle the task.

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