Tag: ‘pong’
OpenAI’s GPT-4 Created a Playable Version of Pong in Under 60 Seconds
‘Pong’ is now half a century old
Exactly 50 years ago today, Atari released Pong. It wasn’t the first video game ever created, nor the original take on virtual table tennis – a fact that would eventually lead to two decades of lawsuits. But in Pong, the early video game industry was born. Released in 1972, Atari sold more than 8,000 Pong arcade cabinets. A few years later, the home version of Pong would become an instant success, with Sears selling about 150,000 units of the console you needed to play the game.
Those are modest sales numbers by 2022 standards, but the success of Pong and Home Pong gave Atari the resources and expertise needed to create the Atari 2600. The second-generation console went on to sell more than 30 million units before the end of 2004. All things considered, pretty good for a project that was only meant to be a training exercise for designer Allan Alcorn, who was 24 at the time and had no prior video game experience. And if not for Pong, Nintendo would not exist, and a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak may have not gone on to create Apple.
Happy birthday, Pong, and thank you for inspiring countless sequels and knockoffs, as well as the careers of an entire generation of video game designers.
Watch Google’s ping pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally
As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at ping pong as well. For now they emphasize it is “cooperative,” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros […]
Watch Google’s ping pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Live Brain Cells Playing Pong in a Dish Could Illuminate Mind’s Mechanics – CNET
Scientists taught a Petri dish of brain cells to play Pong better than I can
Scientists taught brain cells to play legendary ‘Pong’ game
Brain cells now know the irresistible lure of the classic arcade game “Pong.” A peer-reviewed study in Neuron from Australian biotech company Cortical Labs show how neurons are not only capable of playing a version of the table tennis game, but that they can adapt and get better the longer they play.
The study’s authors set up a game-like simulation by putting human stem cells and mouse embryonic cells in a dish equipped to capture and stimulate the cells’ electric activity. Scientists then simulated a Pong-like environment in the dish, aptly called “DishBrain,” by delivering inputs to electrodes to mimic the presence of a Pong ball. In real-time they recorded how cells, acting as paddles in this scenario, responded. This was then translated into whether or not the cells, “intercepted” the ball.
Throughout the 486 games played, scientists discovered that the more Pong the cells played, the better they got. Both human and mouse cell cultures missed the initial serve less and achieved longer rallies over time. We know that cells are capable of using feedback to learn and adapt because, well, animal life wouldn’t exist otherwise. But this marks the first time that scientists were able to harness this ability “for a goal-directed behavior,” the study read.
Credit: Cortical Labs
Creating an environment that controls the sentience and self-organizing capabilities of cells, effectively means we can simulate intelligence. “This is the new way to think about what a neuron is,” Dr. Brett Kagan, the study’s lead author and chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs told the Guardian. The cells’ historic Pong game has big potential. It could provide valuable insight into the study of neurological diseases like epilepsy and dementia. Generally speaking, it represents a “sandbox” for testing the effects of drugs and genetic variants with “exactly the same computing (neuronal) elements found in your brain and mine,” said Karl Friston, co-author and theoretical neuroscientist at University College London in the announcement.
Naturally, the next step in this research is to add booze. For the cells, that is. “We’re trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol – basically get them ‘drunk’ and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink,” said Kagan.
If you’ve ever played Pong, or any other arcade game drunk, you might be able to predict the results. We are, after all, governed by these Pong-playing neurons.
Scientists got lab-grown human brain cells to play ‘Pong’
Researchers who grew a brain cell culture in a lab claim that they taught the cells to play a version of Pong. Scientists from a biotech startup called Cortical Labs say it’s the first demonstrated example of a so-called “mini-brain” being taught to carry out goal-directed tasks. ”It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time,” Dr. Brett Kagan, lead author of a paper on the research that was published in Neuron, told the BBC.
The culture of 800,000 brain cells is known as DishBrain. The scientists placed mouse cells (derived from embryonic brains) and human cells taken from stem cells on top of an electrode array that was hooked up to Pong, as The Age notes. Electrical pulses sent to the neurons indicated the position of the ball in the game. The array then moved the paddle up and down based on signals from the neurons. DishBrain received a strong and consistent feedback signal (effectively a form of stimulus) when the paddle hit the ball and a short, random pulse when it missed.
The researchers, who believe the culture is too primitive to be conscious, noted that DishBrain showed signs of “apparent learning within five minutes of real-time gameplay not observed in control conditions.” After playing Pong for 20 minutes, the culture got better at the game. The scientists say that indicates the cells were reorganizing, developing networks and learning.
“They changed their activity in a way that is very consistent with them actually behaving as a dynamic system,” Kagan said. “For example, the neurons’ ability to change and adapt their activity as a result of experience increases over time, consistent with what we see with the cells’ learning rate.”
Future research into DishBrain will involve looking at how medicines and alcohol affect the culture’s ability to play Pong, to test whether it can effectively be treated as a stand-in for a human brain. Kagan expressed hope that DishBrain (or perhaps future versions of it) can be used to test treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford University cultivated stem cells into human brain tissue, which they transplanted into newborn rats. These so-called brain organoids integrated with the rodents’ own brains. After a few months, the scientists found that the organoids accounted for around a third of the rats’ brain hemispheres and that they were engaging with the rodents’ brain circuits. As Wired notes, these organoids could be used to study neurodegenerative disorders or to test drugs designed to treat neuropsychiatric diseases. Scientists may also look at how genetic defects in organoids can affect animal behavior.