You may remember that a couple of years ago scientists taught a petri dish full of brain cells how to play Pong. As The Guardian reports, researchers at the University of Reading were inspired by that and have now taught play the classic table tennis videogame to some ionized goop.
Bear with me as I try to explain how this worked. A computer simulation of Pong was hooked up to two electrode arrays, with a layer of hydrogel in the middle. Opposing pairs of electrodes were stimulated to map to the movement of the ball across the screen. Charged ions in the hydrogel moved in response to that electrical stimulation, and the point where the current was highest was treated as the position of the paddle.
“At the beginning the ions are equally and randomly distributed so the paddle hits and misses the ball,” said Dr Vincent Strong, listed as first author of the research published in the journal Cell. As the simulation went on, the hydrogel improved—it not only played Pong, it got better at it. “We are claiming that it has memory, and through that memory it can improve in performance by gaining experience,” Dr Strong said.
As a layperson it sounds to me like proof that Pong is a simple enough game a random array of charged ions attracted to electrical stimulus will eventually line up in a way that represents a slightly better than random tactic. When the game was new, kids would arrange the controls so that the ball would bounce back and forth between them indefinitely then sit back and stare at the hypnotic display for ages—what I’m saying is Pong is not a complex simulation. It’s a game designed for children from 1972.
Still, I do love the claim that electrical goop is capable of forming memories. It’s like the first scene in a remake of The Blob where the goo is eventually trained on more modern, violent videogames until it learns to kill and breaks free to have its revenge. Researchers may resent the way horror movies insist on portraying them as mad scientists, but they will continue giving quotes to the mainstream media that make them sound as unhinged as any Vincent Price character.