UK Researchers Develop Electroactive Polymer Gel with Learning Ability and Apply It in Table Tennis Game

TapTechNews August 26th news, researchers at the University of Reading in the UK have successfully developed an electroactive polymer (EAP) gel with a "learning" ability and applied it in the classic table tennis game "Pong" to test its learning ability. The research results show that this gel "brain" can continuously adjust its electrical signal output to adapt to the game rules and improve its game level. This research result was published in "Cell Reports Physical Science".

According to TapTechNews, the researchers connected the EAP gel to an electrode array to enable it to control the racket in the game. By observing the performance of the gel in the game, the researchers found that the gel performed poorly at the beginning, but as time went by, its game level gradually improved, and reached the peak level after about 20 minutes.

This EAP gel control system is completely different from a conscious life form, but it still shows an emergent ability that the material was not originally designed for. Vincent Strong, an engineer at the University of Reading, explained: "The contraction speed of the hydrogel is much slower than the expansion speed, which means that the next movement of ions is affected by its previous movement, which is a bit like the occurrence of memory. The continuous rearrangement of ions inside the hydrogel is based on the previous internal rearrangement of the hydrogel, which can be traced back to when it was first made and had a uniform ion distribution."

Yoshikatsu Hayashi, a biomedical engineer at the University of Reading, said that his research shows that even very simple materials can exhibit complex, adaptive behaviors that are usually associated with biological systems or complex artificial intelligence. This provides new possibilities for the development of new smart materials that can learn and adapt to the environment.

In the future, similar research may make progress in fields such as prosthetics, soft robots, and adaptive materials. Currently, this study seems to mainly prove that "the learning and adaptation systems in living systems may be more widespread than previously thought". The researchers plan to continue to study this EAP hydrogel to discover the limit of its "memory" ability and apply it to other tasks. In the past, they have also demonstrated the ability of this material to imitate the beating heart tissue.