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

A Carmack might've kept the system stable long enough

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

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.

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

Great project btw!

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

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...

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...

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.

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.