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Posted by ano-ther 3 days ago

Rats Play DOOM(ratsplaydoom.com)
421 points | 157 commentspage 4
basket_horse 2 days ago|
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.

LightBug1 3 days ago||
I'm a little conflicted on the ethics of this ... but this would have made a kickass youtube channel.
Wowfunhappy 3 days ago|
Why? Unless you're against keeping pets in general, what's wrong with training your pet rat to play a video game?
zugi 3 days ago|||
Violent video gaming is especially good if it keeps them off social media. We know that's bad for them.
LightBug1 3 days ago|||
I haven't look deep into this, but all the first thing I could think of is Clockwork Orange.

Rat strapped into some contraption and forced to play a game.

Wowfunhappy 6 hours ago||
I haven’t read/watched Clockwork Orange, but I can understand the dystopian image.

It’s just that, when I think about it, I don’t see a difference in kind between training the rat to play a video game and teaching a dog to roll over and play dead. Neither is natural animal behavior, and the animal doesn’t really have a choice in either case.

bit1993 3 days ago||
> Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe)...

Missed opportunity to name them Neo, Morpheus and Trinity.

saltwatercowboy 3 days ago||
That's such a fun project. Some really excellent Show HN items this week, but this is my favourite.
k0ba 3 days ago|
thx. :3 years of hard work. you might check out yolorun.capital for similar projects.
jadamson 3 days ago||
This website causes my browsers (Chrome/Brave) to use a huge amount of CPU. Firefox handles it better but still has higher CPU usage than I'd expect.
tempodox 3 days ago||
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!
ge96 3 days ago||
> 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

chickenhun 3 days ago|
yeah good point! we actually have air puffs for that. we extracted from DOOM when a wall is hit in-game. when that happens, the corresponding side puff activates.
ge96 3 days ago||
that's cool, I assume the sound doesn't scare the rat/does its purpose, sounds like a better solution than a physical wall moving

also nice to see those classic cheap blue stepper motors ha

canyp 3 days ago||
No gameplay footage?
nickpsecurity 3 days ago||
Next, train squirrels to play Mirrors Edge.
Forgeties79 3 days ago|
That’s all well and good, but when are we going to be able to play DOOM on rats?
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