Running ‘Doom’ on E. coli cells… very, very slowly
www.popsci.com
It would take nearly 600 years to finish playing this MIT student's iteration of the classic video game.
  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    136·
    26 days ago

    we need a distinction between “can it run doom” and "can it function as a grayscale display with ultra low fps "

    • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      82·
      26 days ago

      Yeah, kinda sick of some of the so called Doom hacks.

      I saw one where they claimed they made a pregnancy test play doom. No, the dude got a small OLED display that he hooked up to a computer that ran doom and displayed it, then put the OLED in a pregnancy test, where it normally had a different and likely worse OLED.

      That isn’t the point of the can it run doom thing at all

        • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
          18·
          26 days ago

          Add artificial intelligence somewhere in there

          Did researchers just use AI to train ecoli to play doom??? No but watch these ads

        • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
          9·
          25 days ago

          the clickbait so god damn annoying now. it’s like yesterday when there was an article that PewDiePie made an AI to rival ChatGPT and it’s free. no. he vibe coded an LLM workspace. that’s it.

          Or the Nostalgia bait articles “the Zip Drive was amazing!” no, no it wasn’t you weren’t there.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
            2·
            25 days ago

            The best one I’ve seen is where somebody run Minecraft via a VHS cassette. But that was fine because they weren’t claiming that the old CRT TV was now working as a computer, they just invented a Bluetooth VHS adaptor which in and of itself was quite cool.

    • Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      23·
      25 days ago

      This would have been better as a “Can it show Bad Apple” (which is cool too). “Can it run DOOM” should be about it actually running the program doom.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    74·
    26 days ago

    Technically, the game is not running on E. Coli, but the display is E. Coli.

    Cool none the less!

  • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    25 days ago

    Man, we can run doom on bacteria but not neogeo

    Wtf neogeo I thought you were cool

    • QuadratureSurfer@piefed.socialEnglish
      8·
      25 days ago

      Since the E. coli here are only functioning as a screen, you could do the same thing with a neogeo and then write another clickbait article about it.

  • ArchAengelus@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    That 8 hour 20 minute spec for returning to baseline could probably be sped up a bit to improve the inter-frame timing

    Modern monitors measure gray-to-gray time as the response, rather than black-to-black. So if she computed the 50% luminescence threshold time on the decay side, and then started injecting the next round at that time, could likely cut the decay time to closer to 200 minutes minutes for the first frame, and then probably double that for the inter-frame times, depending on the GFP decay rate.

    Who knows, maybe she already took that into account. She seems to be well rounded.

    From the charts in the video (above), it looks to be symmetrical near the peak, but the 50% concentration on decay is around 200 minutes minutes of decay followed by 70 minutes ramping up would put the inter-frame time to be about 3.5 hours.

    I realize concentration of fluorescing enzyme may not be 1:1 with lumens emitted.

    If this worked the way I imagine, This cuts the total time to play from 600 years to about 200 years. Rounded to 1 significant figure, since this is all ballpark math anyway.