You may remember that a few 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 took inspiration from this and have now taught an ionized mass the classic table tennis video game.
Let me try to explain to you how this works. A computer simulation of Pong was connected to two electrode arrays with a layer of hydrogel in the middle. Opposite pairs of electrodes were stimulated to map the ball’s movement across the screen. Charged ions in the hydrogel moved in response to this electrical stimulation, and the point where the current was highest was considered the position of the racket.
“Initially, the ions are evenly and randomly distributed, so the racket sometimes hits the ball and sometimes misses,” said Dr. Vincent Strong, lead author of the study published in the journal Cell. As the simulation progressed, the hydrogel improved – it didn’t just play Pong, it got better at it. “We’re saying that it has a memory, and that this memory allows it to improve its performance by gaining experience,” said Dr. Strong.
To me, as a layman, this sounds like proof that Pong is a fairly simple game: a random arrangement of charged ions attracted by electrical stimuli will eventually align in a way that represents a slightly better than random tactic. When the game was new, kids would arrange the controls so the ball bounced endlessly between them, and then sit back and stare at the hypnotic display forever – what I’m saying is that Pong is not a complex simulation. It’s a game designed for kids in 1972.
Still, I love the claim that electric slime can form memories. It’s like the first scene in a remake of The Blob, where the slime is finally trained on more modern, violent video games until it learns to kill and breaks free to seek revenge. Researchers may resent the fact that horror movies keep portraying them as mad scientists, but they will continue to provide the mainstream media with quotes that make them sound as insane as any Vincent Price character.
