Video game-playing hydrogel found to have ability to learn and remember

British scientists led by Dr. Vincent Strong from the University of Reading have found that a water-saturated hydrogel can not only play the video game Pong, but also improve its skills, The Guardian reports .

"We are saying that it has a memory, and that memory allows it to improve its performance as it gains experience," said Vincent Strong. However, his team said that scientists cannot say for sure that the hydrogel has a mind.

Strong said the work could offer an easier way to develop algorithms for neural networks — the models that underlie artificial intelligence systems including Chat GPT — noting that they are currently based on how biological structures work.

Released in 1972, Pong was one of the first video games. It has a simple concept: two paddles on a court can be moved up and down to pass a ball between them. The longer the game, the more points.

Strong worked with a single-player version of the game, in which the racket is moved along one wall of the court to cause the ball to bounce off it.

In the study, the scientists placed the hydrogel between two plates with electrodes. They stimulated them to simulate the movement of a ball on a court. In response to the electrical stimulation, the ions contained within the hydrogel moved and stopped in different places.

"Initially, the ions were distributed evenly and randomly, so the racket would hit and miss the ball," Strong said. Over time, he said, the ion concentrations increased in the areas where the ball landed most often, allowing the hydrogel to move the racket more precisely, acting on a kind of muscle memory.

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