Briefing chat: ‘Can it run Doom?’ — why scientists got brain cells and a satellite to play the classic game

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1:53important entry to the medium and that is doom released in 1993 by id software it's a first person shooter that will be familiar to many of you listening right now perhaps like me even if you've not played it in many years the cheat code idkfa is seared into your brain but this isn't a trip down memory lane today doom has become something of a workhorse of science and writing about this is Nature's Rachel Fieldhouse, who joins me down the line from Australia. Rachel, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. And I say there, it's a workhorse. It's been used as a tool across many scientific disciplines, right?

2:34Absolutely. Everything from computer science and AI all the way to biology. And there's a particular subculture that I have been fascinated about for years, which I think perhaps is the main thrust of your article. And this is this, can it play Doom? Almost meme, I guess. Now, basically, if something has a screen, people will try and get it to run Doom. Essentially, yeah. We've seen everything from calculators and smart fridges to even computerized pregnancy tests and the little digital bars on the top of MacBook keyboards. It's glorious, right? I mean, you and I have been sharing them. I think electric toothbrush is one of my favorites.

3:10Getting Doom to play inside of Doom is a recursive nightmare we haven't got time to talk about, but there are hundreds of them and listeners can go and find them on the internet. And many of them are glaringly silly, but there's a new one that's been added to the list that you've really been taking a look at. Yes. So a team in Australia have decided to essentially get their biological computer to run Doom. So their computer is basically a collection of about 200 ,000 neurons on top of a silicon chip. And so what they've done is they worked with this independent researcher from Singapore who wrote the code and it was part of a hackathon that they ran.

3:48And the whole point of the challenge was, can people get Doom to run on their biological computer? And it was a success. So it took about a week for the team to teach the computer how to run and play Doom. It's about on par with the average player, so it's not going to be winning any competitions anytime soon, but it's something that they're very excited about and the whole community is excited about. And it's an interesting one because I've seen a video of this, but it's kind of hard to pass exactly what's going on there. So these are human neurons, right? Yes. So they've been taken from stem cells and been differentiated into neurons.

4:26So they're not a whole brain and the team are very, very sure to make sure they don't have a little person that they're creating and getting to run doom for them. And so you say these are neurons on a computer chip then. So what is going on then? How is this being used to play a video game? So essentially they've got this computer and then they've got an intermediate AI. And so what the AI does is translates what's happening on the screen. So walking around, holding the gun, enemies appearing and pickups to boost your health. And it's translating those into electrical signals that then get communicated to the neurons.

4:59And then the neurons are taught to respond with electrical signals. So they might make an electrical signal to the left of the chip, meaning that they want to move left. or they'll fire signals to the right, meaning that they want to move right. That gets fed back into the AI and the AI translates that into the actual movement in the game. So one of the scientists I talked to from Cortical Labs said that this AI was the eyes and the hands of the computer controlling what was going on and seeing for the neurons because, I mean, they don't have eyes. They're a little bunch of cells inside a clear box on top of a chip.

5:32And in your article that you've been writing about this endeavor, you say that this isn't the team's first rodeo, right? like doom is the next step in kind of their evolution it really is so about three years ago in 2022 they published a paper where they showed that they could teach this collection of neurons how to play pong the classic two-paddle game where you basically bounce the ball from the left to the right and they said that that was quite a simple way to start and get their neurons to figure out how to respond to electrical signals and communicate and essentially learn and so now that they achieved that, which again, that also took 18 months for them to achieve.

6:06They decided to amp up the complexity and it worked. And it took them, like I said before, about a week for it to actually work and for the neurons to learn. And when they saw it running then, did you get a sense of how they were feeling then when they saw the, I think it's called Doom guy is the character from Doom, wandering around that first level? Oh, they were incredibly excited. They felt a real sense of achievement. And I think that's really been reflected in the response, both from the community and from the wider general audience. Everyone who's come across this has been very excited.

6:32And I mean, why have they done this then? What is their reasoning behind getting these brain cells on a chip to play this video game? So essentially, it's the same with Pong, but they wanted to create a more realistic environment for the neurons to get them to learn how to adapt as things change. And that's particularly with Doom. There's constantly going to be different things that the neurons have to respond to. So they think that there's lots of applications. So for one, almost like an alternative to AI computing that is a lot more energy efficient. It doesn't require as much of the resources to run.

7:01It doesn't consume nearly as much energy. And they also see a lot of potential in drug testing and drug development as well, because you're also trying to get something that acts a little bit more like a human brain. So it might be a bit more reflective of what a drug could be like when it's actually given to a human. And this has some potential then. But getting neurons to play Doom, this isn't the first attempt, right? This definitely isn't the first time that someone has taught neurons how to play Doom. So there was another team in 2023 who used rat neurons. And then because of their success, that inspired both the latest development in this Can It Doom meme and then also some other projects.

7:37So one person I talked to, she was inspired by the rat neuron team to display doom on bacterial cells. So this was part of her PhD project at MIT. And she basically engineered these E. coli cells to have a fluorescent tag that could turn on and off and she translated the first few frames of Doom into like an interpretation of what it would actually look like in full colour and she figured out which cells would need to be turned on and off for each frame and got the cells to fluoresce and showed the first few frames. It did take about 70 minutes to get full bright display of these cells so she actually also calculated it and based on the average time it takes someone to play Doom she could show a whole gameplay of Doom in about 599 years.

8:27Sure. I think when it comes to video games, everyone talks about frames per second, right? The higher the frames per second on your screen, the better. And this maybe isn't optimal for video gaming. No. And there's one more example, which is such an interesting one. It's getting Doom into space. So what happened is we had two software developers, one in Norway and one in Estonia, now in the United States, and they met over their love of Doom. So one researcher, he managed to figure out how to run Doom without a screen and essentially rejig the code to make sure that it could run and would still produce outputs.

8:59And his collaborator, who worked in the European Space Agency, was wanting to fulfill his dream of playing Doom in space. So they got together, figured it out, and then they used a satellite, which is essentially intended as a flying laboratory for experiments that wouldn't be able to be performed on missions otherwise, because the stakes are so high when satellites get sent into space. There's really no space, no pun intended, to perform some of the more risky experiments using software. But presumably this wasn't just a flight of fancy. No, it was definitely useful. And what they wanted to know was whether the software was damaged while the satellite had been in orbit.

9:36So it had been in orbit for a few years and they wanted to see whether there was damage caused by radiation because that would then cause the program, so DOOM, to not function as it should. And part of the appeal of DOOM was that it is deterministic. So it runs the exact same way every time we play it, partly because of what one of these researchers had done with this code to make sure it was deterministic. They also showed that you could continuously test software while it is in space. So that's not really been done before. It's not really considered a normal part of space operations for software.

10:07So it seems like Doom fit the bill in this situation then. I mean, is there something about this software generally then that makes it so popular for researchers to use in whatever it is they're using it for? So there are a few things. One is the size because it's a small program because it's old and doesn't require a lot of the computing power that a lot of modern software and a lot of modern games require. So that means it could be run on all kinds of different devices. Also, one of the big draws about it is that the source code, so the code that's needed to run the whole game is freely available.

10:38So one of the developers, John Carmack, released the code in 1997, basically letting everyone go bananas with it. And the last thing is just the cultural impact. So Doom has continued to be such a popular game. We've had the continuing franchise. And you can really communicate in just a few words something really cool about science and get people engaged and interested by just saying it can run Doom. And it's an interesting one because on the face of it, this is quite an irreverent pastime in many ways, right? Like, can it run Doom? Does it run Doom? I mean, there are thousands of Reddit forum posts on this sort of thing.

11:13But it does seem that it can be used. And as you say, there has been used in science. It definitely has. And it encourages play and creativity. And that's such a core thing for scientists. You need that creativity to solve problems and make discoveries. And also, even though things might seem really silly and random, I mean, getting doomed to run on a fridge, what's the benefit in that? But you actually still require some really technical skills to get that to happen. And so one person I was talking to said, she's not curing cancer, she's not making all these massive discoveries, but she's done something that requires technical finesse.

11:46and makes people happy and entertains people and gives them a sense of hope. And I think that's such an important part of science. Well, wonderful. I think that's a good place to leave it. Rachel, we'll put a link to your article in the show notes. But until next time, I've been Benjamin Thompson. Rachel Fieldhouse, thank you so much for joining me. Again, thank you so much for having me.

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13:01Usa la prueba de Cologuard en la privacidad de tu casa y envíala de regreso para obtener tus resultados. La prueba de Cologuard es una opción con receta para detectar el cáncer de colon en personas de 45 años o más con riesgo promedio. The results positive can be followed by a colonoscopy. They can be positive results and negative results. The test of Cologuard is not replacing the colonoscopy in high risk patients. No use Cologuard if you have a kidney, if you have an intestinal disease, or a certain disease of a cellular disease or a family of cancer. The test of Cologuard is a doctor. For more information in Spanish, visit Cologuard.com.

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