Rats taught to play Doom 2

They can move and they can shoot, but they can't get past the first level of Doom 2.

Doom can be played on many things. You can play it on a graphing calculator, ATM, office phone, digital camera, toaster, piano, pregnancy test, and even a washing machine. However, this is the first time we've heard of Doom being played by rats.

Neuroengineer Victor Toth has created a sophisticated apparatus to get rats to play Doom 2. You can read the full details at Medium ,where he published his full report, but the essence of it is that the rat is suspended from a polystyrene ball with a tiny sweater. The rat runs over the ball, which activates sensors that move the player character. Placing directly in front of the rat allows it to shoot and also rewards it with food and water for playing.

Also in front of the rat is a giant curved game monitor that, from the rat's point of view, should look like playing in an iMax theater.

This was all done using a 3D printer and items purchased from Amazon, so if you have a pet rat you'd like to train, you can do it yourself too.

Perhaps the best part of the story is the names of each rat, which are Romero, Carmack and Tom. “Romero was fearless (more like a thrill seeker) and loved grapes. Carmack was a real architect and was fond of bananas. Tom began to feel shy, but he had the most surprises in academic performance.

At this point, you may rightly be wondering: why rats? Well, it's not just about the continuation of the meme. He hopes his work will allow other scientists to cheaply develop training programs for other rats in a virtual environment.

“The rat, while immobile relative to the set, can express a wide range of behaviors as well as be recorded by the neural interface,” Toth writes. “In this way, movement and complex play actions can be correlated with neural activity in a virtual, but more natural, living set of experiments than, for example, in simple mazes.”

In addition, they very cute especially in those tiny sweaters.

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