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Neuralink Lets a Monkey Play Pong With His Mind Updates experiment

Apr 05,2024
2 min read
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Neuralink, a startup owned by Elon Musk is developing a brain-machine interface that will enable users to control computers and smartphones directly from their brain. Founded in 2016, Neuralink has made some serious progress and now demonstrating it by showing a macaque named Pager playing Pong video game with the help of a N1 neural link chip. Tvideo in which, Pager first uses a joystick and then uses the signals from his brain to control the cursor on the screen. The primary application of this project is to enable people with disabilities like paralysis to operate computers and other devices with ease using the electrical signals from their brains.

As we can see in the above video, Neuralink explains how it used its sensor hardware and brain implant to record a baseline of activity of Pager as it played a game on-screen where it had to move a token to different squares using a joystick with its hand. Neuralink, using that baseline data, was able to anticipate where Pager was going to be moving the physical controller, and was eventually able to predict it accurately before the move was actually made using machine learning.

Continuing with the experiment, researchers then removed the paddle entirely, and eventually did the same thing with Pong, ultimately ending up at a place where Pager no longer was even moving its hand on the air on the nonexistent paddle, and was instead controlling the in-game action entirely with its mind via the Link hardware and embedded neural threads.