There’s a new weirdest way to play Doom: using rat neurons grown in a jar

rockpapershotgun.com:

Teletext. Notepad. Twitter. A tractor. A pregnancy test. There have been few limits to the weird and wonderful ways that enterprising Doom fans have found to play the seminal FPS over the last 30 years, but this latest one might take the crown for both weirdest and wonderful-est. Someone is teaching a bunch of lab-grown rat neurons to play Doom. Yes, their literal conscious existence is Doom. I told you it was weird.

YouTuber The Thought Emporium’s recent video details - with the emphasis on detail - their process of growing a network of rat neurons, with the ambition of ultimately hooking the brain-like creation to a computer running Doom and teaching it to master the shooter.(Thanks, PC Gamer.)

While the YouTuber has previously performed experiments with neurons derived from human stem cells, apparently cortical rat neurons are cheaper, easier to source (you can apparently just buy millions of neurons online, which is a thing I learnt today) and are smart enough to learn Doom.

The neurons are placed into a set of small jar-like containers, where they are fed with a very specific solution to allow them to grow and crawl (!!!), gradually forming connected networks that can then be hooked up to a PC via an electrode array. (As a slightly disconcerting sidenote, there is regular reference to a fridge-like machine called a Meatcubator used to help prepare the neurons.)

The plan is to train the network of neurons to successfully blast cacodemons by using electrical noise that the neurons “like” and “dislike”, rewarding them for killing enemies while punishing them for dying - effectively Pavlovian conditioning for neurons. The video admits that there’s no consensus on whether the nice noise feels closer to a treat