Rats in Doom VR

https://medium.com/mindsoft/rats-in-doom-eb6c52c73aca

by dgellow • 5 years ago

114 52 5 years ago

medium.com

haihaibye• 5 years ago

Despite all the gloom I am still just a rat playing Doom

karim79• 5 years ago

then someone will say what is lost, can never be saved.

pzh• 5 years ago

They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.

revolvingocelot2• 5 years ago

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

OneTimePetes2• 5 years ago

Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.

mattkrause3• 5 years ago

VR has become a pretty popular tool in neuroscience.

Rodents can be trained to follow cues shown in VR, or even navigate to specific virtual locations by running on the sphere, so they can certainly perceive something.

That said, vision is certainly not their primary sense and the organization of their visual system is...dissimilar from humans and other primates.

TehCorwiz• 5 years ago

From the article: "Although the mechanisms to train left-right turning was present, I did not have time to train movements with turns included, so in most sessions only one axis of motion was registered."

spants• 5 years ago

seems cruel to me.

lightbendover• 5 years ago

You would really hate to see the mouse house and depending labs of any research hospital then. The mice here are living a life of luxury by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know you or someone else will come out against those practices as well; I would love to hear ideas for a replacement or a proposal to just stop science and progress all together.

tailspin2019• 5 years ago

I don’t have a strong opinion for or against the use of rodents in science, but the tone of your comment was uncalled for, in response to someone simply expressing compassion for a living creature.

captainclam• 5 years ago

But that’s medical research. This is just a hobby project.

It seems completely reasonable to object to using mammals in one’s tech projects, while admitting the value to using animal models to advance medical science.

jhardy542• 5 years ago

There are loads of smart people advocating for alternatives to animal testing.

Easy example from Johns Hopkins: the center for alternatives to animal testing https://caat.jhsph.edu/

m00dy• 5 years ago

This should be called Reinforcement Learning :)

lab14• 5 years ago

From the videos, I got the impression that they just followed a straight line trying to reach the food that was in front of them.

penjelly• 5 years ago

thats all that was shown, straight line travel, doors reward with food, running into an enemy blocks travel until enemy dispatched.

I wasnt impressed until i realized this id a starting point and it could be further developed potentially.

cruelty• 5 years ago

That's just mean. Those poor animals how creepy can humans get. Leave them alone.

DocTomoe• 5 years ago

This is a major improvement over how these things were done in the past, which often involved applying stimuli over brain diodes.

workinman• 5 years ago

If you think this is bad you should see what they do to lab rats >.>

jhardy542• 5 years ago

Also sad and often unnecessary, but at least there’s usually some legitimate science instead of whatever this is.

jrootabega• 5 years ago

The rats applied for an internship

prewett• 5 years ago

How is it mean? They get all their needs provided for, two companions, no fear of predators, and every so often they get put out on a ball which dispenses candy when they run.

asxd3• 5 years ago

Reading the article, it seems like this was exactly their situation. It seemed like it was in the author's best interest to keep them comfortable and friendly since this was an operant conditioning task. He also mentions the only negative reinforcement considered was a puff of air, but he opted not to use it.

boomskats• 5 years ago

Ahh, this post feels like it's gonna be a footnote in the history of the Meta Matrix.

bckr• 5 years ago

Why don't we just train rats to react to transpiled digital stimuli instead of CNNs?

kak4• 5 years ago

cruel, leave them alone

johnmato• 5 years ago

Times have changed, lab rats are now playing a VR video game.

cphoover• 5 years ago

Can they navigate turns, or are they just being conditioned to run in a straight line for sugar?

Interesting exploration though.

natpalmer1776• 5 years ago

Does anyone notice how he used a trackball mouse design to track their motion in VR?

I feel like there is a clever joke in there somewhere.

yincrash• 5 years ago

Just reinforcing the stereotype that a rat is just a giant mouse

dvirsky• 5 years ago

My thought was mainly "ok how can I build a ball big enough for a VR rig for myself?"

Jarmsy• 5 years ago

After this and the recent conversation about the 'rat shadows' setting in Dishonored, I just keep humming to myself-

♫♪♪ The last that ever she saw him ♫♪♪

♫♪♪ Carried away by the Doom-rat shadow ♫♪♪

danesparza• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Cave Johnson got started at Aperture Science...

https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Cave_Johnson

garaetjjte• 5 years ago

Nah, I think they were making shower curtains.

oigursh• 5 years ago

Sometimes feel like _I'm_ a rat in a maze of doom.

puttycat2• 5 years ago

This is insanely heartless.

bin_bash3• 5 years ago

That's a little strong. Arguably a bit inhumane but nothing like what we put them through for drug tests I'm sure.

puttycat2• 5 years ago

Do animals (incl. humans) who go through one sort of torture find comfort in the fact that there are worst forms of torture?

asxd3• 5 years ago

To folks saying this is heartless, I'd urge you to scroll down to the "Experiment" section of the article:

I received three 8-week-old male Long Evans rats, Romero, Carmack and Tom. Romero was fearless (more like thrill-seeking) and loved grapes. Carmack was a real architect building around its home keeping it tidy; he was fond of bananas. Tom began shy, but held the most surprises in learning performance.
I spent around 6 weeks with them during their (and my) night cycle, ~1 hour with each daily. It took two weeks to habituate them to me — this process could be accelerated, I was just a little slow with them. One week to teach them to stay put while I was dressing them; I also tested multiple harnesses and their combinations during this time.

It seems to me from this that the rats were well-cared for and the author formed a bond with them, considering how he seems to fondly recount their personality quirks.

jmull• 5 years ago

That doesn't really reassure me.

I don't know anywhere near enough about rats in general or this particular situation to say whether or not this is something bad for the rats, but this recounting of basic bonding doesn't really tell me anything.

asxd3• 5 years ago

Just anecdotally, I had a pet rat as a kid. They're pretty friendly creatures who seem to enjoy company and playtime. Not sure what constitutes "bad for the rats", but I personally think a situation where they're getting food, safety and stimulation would not fit into that category.

bin_bash3• 5 years ago

I think the final line is more reassuring:

The experiment was approved by the Feinstein Institutes’ Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Sounds like he went through the proper channels.

Neil44• 5 years ago

Can you play against the rats?

Rats in Doom VR

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