The long-standing experiment that aims to teach rats how to play the game Doom II has reached another milestone: The rats can now shoot down their demonic enemies. The idea is to see if it’s possible to teach rats, and perhaps other animals, more complicated behaviors in virtual environments, opening new avenues for animal mental enrichment, behavioral training, or new ways to utilize the unique capabilities of certain animals for practical purposes.
The Rats Play Doom project first emerged in 2021 and quickly captured considerable interest. Getting Doom to run on a calculator is one thing, but to get it running on an animal’s brain is another thing entirely. Of course, the rat isn’t running the Doom code as the calculator does, but it receives the same visual and audio cues as a human player and can now interact with them more readily.
The new rig augments the original rotational sphere to add increased nuance to movements, a firing trigger, and a new system to inform the rats they’ve hit a wall (to stop them from running in place like classic video game characters). The hardware has been upgraded, too, with a new curved AMOLED display. The rats likely appreciate the OLED’s increased contrast ratio and faster pixel response time, but the curved screen likely enhances immersion, potentially making it easier for some in-game cues to elicit a response.
The experiment rewards rats with sweetened water for performing a desired action. Presumably, they receive a steady drip of the stuff every time they put a shotgun shell through a demon’s chest.
The results of the experiment were good, too. Researchers managed to get the rats to run around Doom II’s maze-like levels and shoot down enemies within about two weeks. That’s a promising start, with more tests planned in the future.
As Tom’s Hardware points out, there’s no neurological mapping here, no invasive surgeries or brain chips. It’s just classic reinforcement training, but with a slightly higher-tech twist. Although the setup is obviously over-the-top, it’s intriguing to imagine what might be learned about animal behavior and potential training techniques. There have been experiments using virtual environments with livestock, such as placing VR headsets on cows to reduce stress and increase milk production. Perhaps one day we can allow pets and other animals to play games to enrich themselves.