There’s a new material in the country, a soft, water-based gel. Scientists at the University of Reading in the UK used hydrogel to play Pong in the 1970s via different electrodes. What’s even more amazing is that the gel kept getting better at the game.
The Guardian I spoke with Dr. Vincent Strong, one of the authors of the published study. Strong certainly doesn’t claim that the hydrogel exhibits intelligence, but he says it appears to have a memory. “And through that memory, it gains experience and can improve its performance.” The scientist is studying whether the research could help advances in artificial intelligence algorithms, but also how connections are made in the human brain.
The fact that the gel can play table tennis is good enough for now. The Guardian has a video showing exactly how the gel plays the game. For the little ones, Pong is a simple version of table tennis and was one of the first computer games to become a global hit. Players each control a line on one side of the screen, which should be a board. The moving dot on the screen is the ball and you have to keep hitting it with your paddle. If you let the ball pass, your opponent gets a point.
playing in waffle iron
The gel is powered by being pressed between two metal plates, like a waffle iron. Six pairs of electrodes provide the gel with information via shocks about where the dot is on the field and exactly where the paddle is. The secret is that the gel contains charged ions that respond well to shocks. “Over time, the ion concentrations increase in the areas most exposed to the ball, which acts as a kind of muscle memory,” Strong explains. “With higher concentrations, the electrical current readings are higher, and the paddle can operate more accurately.” In other words, the gel was able to keep the ball on the field longer and longer because the ion concentrations created a kind of memory.
According to the research, the gel can’t really learn. Scientists have also tried attaching electrodes to the gel in other ways, but those methods didn’t make the material any better at playing. With a real nervous system, you can send information in multiple ways and it can still learn from them.
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