Rats Play Doom

I did not expect this to be as thoughtful as it is. Kudos to the thought put into the setup and training. Building custom hardware for the rat is amazing.. I need something like this for my own setup.

Well, the most cyberpunk thing I have read today. No video of rats killing Daemons though, only a promising but broken link.

How can he not include a video of it working? D:

  We reached the point of rat habituation but didn’t start training. Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe) aged out before full testing. The setup works, but behavioral validation is pending.

For those afraid to click: This does not appear to hurt the rats or involve doing any surgery on them.

checks notes I'm sorry, this doesn't qualify to run in the category "running DOOM on <device>"

>We reached the point of rat habituation but didn’t start training. Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe) aged out before full testing. The setup works, but behavioral validation is pending.

Ah man, what a pity. That VR rig is awesome, but it doesn't really seem to me they are planning to continue these experiments, or do they?

I wonder if the team at id considered this when they released Doom: In 30 years rats will be forced to play it in exchange for sugar water.

That's such a fun project. Some really excellent Show HN items this week, but this is my favourite.

Sorry guys, no video of them playing on this setup, just on the previous version. We iterated on v2 too long, our pet rats grew old and couldn't be trained. We open-sourced the hardware and software so others can build upon it. Here's a cute video though of Todd being habituated to the setup: https://x.com/yolorun_capital/status/1999598643339227564 Here's my personal X, dm me if you have any questions, or would want to build it for a lab or for yourself: https://x.com/viktor_thoth

This isn't true of all rats

> It maximizes immersion without obstructing whisker space

hehe very important

although... if the walls moved and touched the whiskers in conjunction with the game could be something

I'm a little conflicted on the ethics of this ... but this would have made a kickass youtube channel.

The year is 2034. Countless attempts at re-producing the sophisticated wetware of the brain have failed. Modeling research has proved unfruitful, with the curse of dimensionality afflicting every attempt at breaking the walls of general intelligence. With only a few million of capital left, and facing bankruptcy, they knew that only one option remained.

"Bring me the rats."

I absolutely love this!

# Suggestion:

You really should release parts as parametric or at least the source files. I see everything is an STL and STLs are just a pain to work with. Suppose we want to try with mice? Or what about my cat? I do not expect just scaling in my slicer is going to end up with a good result, I'll need to redo everything from scratch. But parametric parts? That gives us a lot faster iteration. That gives you a lot faster iteration too! I highly recommend taking that approach when designing and I find it is worth it more often than not.

Could you add cost estimates to the BOM? These never need to be accurate but I always find it helpful when estimating a project. You're just saving people from the time it takes to click every single link and throw them into a calculator. And informs people very quickly what to innovate on to drive costs down. (Sorry, BOMs without cost estimates are a big pet peeve of mine)

# Questions:

- Do the rats enjoy playing Doom?

- Are there specific games the rats like to play?

I've never thought about what types of videogames other animals would enjoy, but damn if you didn't just open Pandora's Box here. I actually think we could learn a lot about them (and even their specific personalities) from this question. It gives a whole other level of refinement than just knowing what my cat's favorite toys and games are...

And also, thanks for open sourcing this! I'm excited to see what comes of it!

As an evolutionary cousin of a rat, the half-second delay after firing my weapon and the response would make me want to eat my whiskers.

This would completely kill any potential reward (and replace it with the opposite, frustration) you're trying to train me with, please fix immediately.

Whats the fascination with Doom? I keep seeing running Doom on this and that and now Rats playing Doom. I mean ok, Doom runs on everything and now rats playing doom. So what?

This is the coolest thing Ive seen in a long time. I wonder if we could use this to train squirrels to not get hit by cars.

>Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe) aged out before full testing.

A Carmack might've kept the system stable long enough

any vidjas of rats playing DOOM

Here is a thought: Maybe we are all just living in some gigantic experiment, that some incomprehensibly advanced civilization has created, to make us indirectly play DOOM, without us even realizing. Any progress we make is just one step further in their experiment, a reward, every issue like war, climate change, corruption, put in place by them as a challenge, while behind it all, in higher dimension, it is translated all into input for their version of DOOM, while they are watching us perform for them. One of them found it funny or interesting, to give us our own DOOM to play with, and now their scientists are speculating, whether it is always the case, that when you give a test population a DOOM, that they will pass a DOOM onto other beings, recursively.

Crazy insane, I love it !

Guys, you should do it with a cockroach ^^ https://makeagif.com/gif/fifth-element-remote-controlled-coc...

In the year 2032, the rodrone wars broke out. What started as innocent video game experiments, had taken a dark turn. After the rats had perfected playing the classic Doom games in 2026, they were easily trained on more complex simulations. In 2028 the first rodent controlled surveillance drones were tested. The year after weaponised. And the first real deployments in warfare in 2030. They easily outperformed OpenAIs latest battle systems. Home robots were soon after remote controlled by rats, known as Rodots. Rodent intelligence escalated quickly as lab selections bred only the smartest specimens. It was only a matter of time before the takeover. Now rodots were building steadily more capable drones and bots. Long before humans could foresee the need for a defense against the rats, the rodrone attack on all humankind, was a fact...

I'm opposed to this project because it involves using animals in medical experiments, which I believe is never ethically justifiable. It goes against basic moral and ethical principles regarding animal treatment. If the project were designed to allow animals to choose whether or not to participate, it would be more acceptable. Some scientists have already explored such approaches. By not giving animals a choice, you're limiting their freedom and potentially exposing them to physical or psychological harm through your simulation. As someone who advocates for animal rights, I'd prefer to see alternative methods that don't involve animals or allow them to participate voluntarily

Treat those rats well, now that you've trained them for combat.

You got pwned by: COMMON FIELD MOUSE

That will feel next level bad when it happens.

Very cool... but why not use something with higher res graphics, if you're going to go through the trouble of building the mechanical system. You could go ultra 4K and see if a rat begins to see... reality.

The headset "maximizes immersion without obstructing whisker space" - nice!

Is there no video of a rat actually playing Doom or did I miss it?

>The impact of prolonged VR exposure on rat well-being needs further research.

Fairly benign, compared to all the other things that get done to rats in labs, I would think.

Next, train squirrels to play Mirrors Edge.

Also in the genre of animals playing video games: ‘Pigs can play video games with their snouts, scientists find’ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56023720

Living to Win (rat version)

How good are the rats and can we start using rats instead of bots? Get them gainfully employed.

While everyone training AI, this man train a rat. Are you gonna release the open weights (or the rat)?

Great project btw!

This website causes my browsers (Chrome/Brave) to use a huge amount of CPU.

People are fsc#ing insane. And I love it !!!

Doom aside (very impressive), I love the concept of putting rats on a roller ball instead of in a wheel for exercise. It would be better on their backs.

Wonderfully crazy. Should the rats have multiple weapons at their disposal, which do they prefer? How many demons escape their fate? Are there videos of gaming sessions? So many questions!

I think there is probably an anthropocentric flaw in the rat display.

Human eyes are side-by-side and forward, with a big binocular overlap and a clear vanishing point. A forward-facing curved screen fits that geometry well.

Rats' eyes, by contrast, are lateral. They have a much wider field of view, a tiny binocular zone, and use motion and contrast more than neat perspective lines. A single human-style "cinema screen" isn't laid out for a rat's optics or brain.

Perhaps if the scenes were rendered with a much wider, 250° FOV, it would help the rat understand what it was seeing better.

Or even rendered with two virtual cameras offset and angled apart, then stitch their outputs into one extra-wide view wrapped onto the curved display. That would approximate the rat’s much wider horizontal field of view and reduce the mismatch between where its eyes are actually looking and where the important visual information appears.

There are other differences in perception of color and motion, but fixing the FOV would be an immediate and relatively easy software fix.

Has anyone 3D printed the levels, VR headsets are one thing but IRL is above that.

Perhaps I’ve just done too much miniature wargaming.

> Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe)...

Missed opportunity to name them Neo, Morpheus and Trinity.

well done!

It's kind of amazing how similar this looks to a joke system my brother came up with in 2005: https://paradies.jeena.net/gourmetica-mentiri/2005/11/sysham...

Unbelievable as it sounds, the US did this in the 1940’s, but with pigeons and actual bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon?wprov=sfti1#

Do the rats enjoy it and if so, will the rats teach other rats how to play?

This could give a whole new meaning to "the rat race"

That’s all well and good, but when are we going to be able to play DOOM on rats?

Is this related to the Tank lab experiments at Princeton?

I’ve seen this before with the practical application being that you can keep the animal stationary while it thinks it’s moving, in order to record brain activity.

No gameplay footage?

Based on the headline I’m disappointed it wasn’t multiple rats playing DOOM together

The rats should be included in the team mentions

Incoming site: Can It Play Doom?

A huge shortcoming with this setup is that rats don't just see in front of them, they see all around them. The screen right in front of his nose doesn't really simulate his environment the way it does for a human. Luckily doom has command line options for screens on the left and the right. But I imagine a lot of his awareness comes from what's above him.