Every three days in a room at the Life Sciences Institute in the National University of Singapore, a technician feeds sugar and salt to 20 boxes of human neurons to keep them alive. This is the second “bio data centre” developed by data centre operators DayOne and biological computing start-up Cortical Labs. They built the first in Melbourne last year. If all goes to plan, they will soon build a third centre with as many as 1,000 boxes.
In 2022, Cortical Labs trained a dish of lab-grown human brain cells to play Pong, the 1970s arcade classic. This February, they took things a step further, connecting a petri dish containing 200,000 cells to Doom, the 1990s first-person shooter. The process was remarkably simple. Software translated what was happening in the game into tiny electrical pulses delivered to the cells via a chip. The cells’ own electrical responses were then translated back into actions in the game — move left, right, shoot. To be trained, cells were sent tiny electric zaps — a predictable pattern of zaps when they did something desired and a chaotic pattern of zaps when they didn’t. Like other living things, even in their primitive state cells prefer order over chaos.
