When the computer game Doom was released in 1993, its utility for science wasn't immediately clear. Since then, the first-person shooter has been used in many studies, from helping to improve artificial-intelligence models1 to investigating the effects of video games on memory and aggression2. It has also spawned a subculture in which fans and developers, including scientists, try to run the game on different devices ' from calculators to digital pregnancy tests. Last month, scientists in Australia reported that they had taught neurons grown on a silicon chip to play the game. The phrases 'Can it run Doom'' and 'It runs Doom' have become a popular Internet meme. Alon Loeffler, a synthetic-biological-intelligence scientist who was part of the team at biotechnology company Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, which trained the neurons, says the team chose Doom because of the meme. He and his colleagues first taught neurons to play the classic video game Pong in 2021. Doom, with its...
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