Last year, Monash University scientists created the "DishBrain" – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.
It was scary stuff, but radically advanced. I mean, it was smashed, it didn’t work, but…it gave us ideas, took us in new directions. I mean, things we would have never…All my work was based on it. – Miles Dyson, Terminator 2: Judgement Day