Scientists have trained an inanimate lump of goo to play the video game Pong.

As reported in New Scientist and described in a research paper from scientists at the University of Reading, researchers took a lump of hydrogel and ran an electric current through it while hooked up to a computer that could play Pong. After some trials, the goo got about 10 percent better at playing Pong.

The goal of all this is to learn more about how biological neural networks (BNNs) work. BNNs are an approximate model of biological consciousness and the basis for the construction of artificial neural networks (ANNs) which systems like ChatGPT and Grok are based on.

The paper noted that ANNs are limited by their hardware. “As approximations of BNNs, ANNs are not capable of the learning found in their biological inspiration,” it said. “Learning behavior, in biological systems, is dependent on the ability of a system to remember the outcomes and consequences of previous iterations within a task.”

One solution to the problem might then be to build a computer with a physical structure similar to that of a living organism. Enter the goo.