A petri dish of 800,000 living human neurons just learned to play DOOM — not with AI, but with actual biological brain cells firing through 59 electrodes, making real-time gameplay decisions.

From Lab Bench to Laptop

Cortical Labs, the Melbourne-based startup behind the 2022 DishBrain Pong experiment, has taken a massive leap. Using their newly released CL API, a developer got living neural cultures to play the iconic 1993 shooter. The neurons receive game state data as electrical stimulation and respond with movement commands in a real-time closed-loop.

The bigger news: on March 10, founder Hon Weng Chong announced the Cortical Cloud — the world's first Biological Data Centre with 120 internet-connected CL1 units. Through a Python API, anyone can now remotely stimulate biological neural networks, read their responses, and build on living tissue. A 1,000-unit facility in Singapore is already planned with partner DayOne.

Why It Matters

Cortical Labs calls this Organic Intelligence (OI) — computation by real biology, not silicon simulations. The practical applications extend well beyond gaming: real-time drug screening on living neurons, neurological disorder research, and energy-efficient computing (biological neurons use orders of magnitude less power than GPUs).

The CL API's technical foundation is detailed in a February 2026 arXiv paper, offering sub-millisecond timing, multi-channel synchronization, and a declarative Python interface — no hardware expertise needed.

The @dishbrainplays account is already teasing live-streamed neuron gaming sessions. For the first time, you can rent time on a living brain.