Running Doom on cells? 

It took only 24 years for the gaming world to grow from cel-shaded graphics to cell-shaded graphics.

What Plattform you playing on? Me: Ecoli bacteria

then way you describe running Doom on literal living cells as "peak human engineering" is just gold. It's amazing how much this game has pushed science forward in the most unintentional ways

What a fucking power move of a final project, good lord, fantastic job

Girl, this is your mad scientist moment

Ever since homo-sapiens first observed the passage of time, becoming aware of their own perspective, metacognition has injected into the human experience the undying need to philosophize. While many wars fought, artistic expressions, and scientific discoveries have been inspired by the underlying principles held by myriad schools of philosophical thought, only one question has become so ubiquitous that it is asked by members of every race and creed: WILL IT RUN DOOM?

This is the first time I think I’ve ever heard someone spell it out rather than say “M-S Doss”. I feel old.

Yep, this will blow up. Good luck on the project, see you all in 600 years

I feel like we ought to start a distinction between "Can it run DOOM?" and "Can it _display_ DOOM?" You could compress any framebuffer to the limitations of this cell display and have them display it - the game's code itself isn't running on cells. Still, this is rad.

Its incredibe how this was just posted recently and yet somehow has the feel of a 2010s youtube video. Great work. Taking academia not so seriously yielded something seriously interesting.

People in 2077: What graphic cells are you playing on?

Somewhere in a lab, a girl is running her version of "the sims" on cells, and it is us...

If I understand the writeup correctly this is a method to turn on/light single pixels/wells by adding AHL. The image is created by having a grid of E. Coli wells and manually adding or not adding AHL to each one. This is a cool project, but I feel like calling it "Running Doom on cells" might be overstating it a bit. If I took 1536 tea candles, arranged them in a 32x48 grid and lit some of them by hand to display a black and white frame of Doom, would I be running Doom on tea candles? I'm not sure. I feel like the candles would not be doing a lot of the "running" part in that case.

Fantastic study! Potential idea: if you modulate the timing and amount of AHL released such that it binds to less LuxR, this should - at least on paper - yield the potential for grayscale imagery.

Please don't ever stop what you love doing ! You are amazing Lauren !

Love the video, love the crazy cut from basic introduction to molecular biotec, they speaking to camera gone wrong, everything. It feels like oldschool RU-vid were people shared genuinely interesting content without fancy video making.

I love that we have people like you in the world. Keep it up and good luck to you in the future.

Wait a minute!! Isn't the plot of Doom the combination of the biology of demonds with technology?

2029: Running Doom on my brain and displaying it on my optical nerves.

RU-vids algorithm actually worked. Showing a low view video that they recognize as high quality. Glad to get in on the ground floor, this video gonna blow up.

@5:10 You could potentially get a better looking 1-bit image by applying the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm instead of simple using thresholding.

So we should set this up in a museum and have it run for 600 years, so we can finally play Doom on cells

E. coli: Lord, what is the meaning of my life? Lauren R.:

Ok, combining doom with e-coli is the coolest idea ever. This was a sooooo cool video. Thx a lot for sharing. The whole project is sooo cool and the vid reminded me how cool biology can be. That is a real masterpiece.🎉 Thx for sharing your work this way.

She is officially a legend. A biology and gaming legend

Now doom is really running everywhere, next on a malignant tumor ;-)

"I can see your MIT education really pays for itself doc"

I am in absolute awe

Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the galaxy, born just in time to get a teaser trailer for Doom 1993 releasing on E. coli.

You are incredible, you explain complex studies as if it were a game. I hope your research takes you very far. Greetings from Mallorca, Spain 🙋🏻‍♂️😊

This is absolutely insane! Congrats

Now we just need to find out if we can play Bad Apple!! on cells

I love this kind of edit.

600 years? Now to establish immortality. The producer being Dick Wolf is a nice touch.

Rule 93: If it exists, you can play DOOM on it. No exceptions

You are gonna be the next thought emporium, playing doom on a literal disease? Cmoooon, that's awesome. Make this in a context for entertainment as opposed to a final project and you've got a *smash* hit. I'm gonna keep an eye on this channel for sure.

I gotta show this to my Bioengineering student workers. They'll stroke out. Fantastic work! I hope the rest of your PhD goes just as well and lightheartedly.

I wish every method's section in every scientific paper included a video exactly like yours (especially the sketch-animated methods in the middle!). Please make one of these for all of the publications in your career 😆

Executive producer: Dick Wolf absolutely kills me

This is your first video? The editing alone is incredible let alone what you have done here. I HOPE you continue to share your knowledge with us more in the future. Just in case, i will like subscribe and hit the bell! Thank you for your hard work!

Humanity in 3347: Can you play DOOM using blackholes? Humanity in 5678: Can you play DOOM in the 4rt dimension?

I'm amazed, intrigued and maybe in love

actually insane accomplishment here, congratulations!

Doom minimum requirements: have cells

We got Doom on Cholera before GTA 6😭😭😭

I *presume* this was probably made as like a one off, or maybe a school project, but BELIEVE me when I say that this?? This video right here... It gives me "early famous youtuber" vibes. Genuinely entertaining, just needs a little bit of refinement of style👌 I'm subbing just in case you ever decide to make content in the future

Now we can truly say the game has gone viral

"We are in the modern era" God how I wish that were still true.

„How talented do you want to be“ Lauren: „Yes.“

“And with that came an opportunity” *cuts to doom music

You are a genius

And now I'm in love

Nice! On 1:02 there is a little mistake at pronuncing id Software: it's not pronunced Hy Dee but Eed, id is a latin word that means “this”. 😉

in TheThoughtEmporium’s defense, this also isn’t running doom on cells; it’s displaying it on cells. now we just need someone to encode the game into cells somehow and we’ll have a cell computer running doom, a cell screen displaying it, and neurons playing it.

Amazing Lauren. Parabéns do Brasil.

Now THIS is what I call "pushing the limits of human ingenuity"! Keep it up~!

From all the bacteria E.Coli always have been the ones to annoy. Next step is to encode Doom in DNA and make cells do it themselves :D

There is no way to express how fucking cool this is

But, can it run Crysis?

First video? I'm subscribed!

Executive Producer Dick Wolf got me. That guy has a hand in everything!

If her professors are seeing this, give this woman a degree already! We already give her a 10/10 here. 😂🎉

This is truly amazing work!! I wonder if there is something that would reduce the return-to-off time, that seems to be the main hurdle.. Also would it be possible to combine the blue glow from Dinoflagellates, the red from Dragonfish and the green from the one you used - that way you could get a full RBG display?!

Ren Ramlan (absolutely bad-arse name) - you are a legend. Take a bow, mate, you've earned it. Btw - 600 years to play the game, sure - but how long would it take to render the first ~20sec of gameplay, enough to show a couple of enemies getting fragged in glorious E-Coli-Vision (sped up to ~30fps, naturally)? I hope they give you a PhD on the spot for this. And the Nobel Prize for being a total GC. (PS - hearing someone clearly old enough to be a PhD candidate and intelligent enough to get gut cells to display Doom pronounce MS-DOS "em-ess dee-oh-ess" makes me want to scream "EM-ESS DOSS, YA GODDAMNED SEPPO!!1" It's not your fault; the US education system is rarely up to MIT's standards and seems more likely to produce conspiracy theorists than literate, thoughtful people lately.) PPS - Ren Ramlan (srsly what a great name), you are, as they say in my brilliant and beautiful land, a true bloody legend, so carry on smashing em for 6 luv. Smashing a tinny and a durrie in your honour.

So, youtube literally recommended this to me on a whim - I know nothing about biology. This is, however, awesome. Makes me wonder how much faster it would be (if at all) if the code also took into account which cells didn't need to change in the next frame. Obviously the time would remain the same between frames, as you'd have to wait for the other cells to switch, but if you combined this with some sort of model which mashed multiple (similar) frames together, you'd probably get an even worse looking, albeit slightly faster game!

This is how we're going to achieve FTL. We're going to ask if we can run Doom on photons and accidentally create negative mass or something.

LOL ren i love you also you're brilliant and this is brilliant

A new doom difficulty has been unlocked: Hell in a Cell.

You need to change the title mate, but regardless this is some amazing stuff!!

This is amazing. Truly peak development in bioingeneering

You can transform it into a 8 bit per pixel system by expressing each frame (with all pixels) on 8 "plates." Brightest shade on a single pixel will be expressed on all 8/8 plates, mid shade on 4/8 plates, darkest shade on 0/8 plates, etc.

In the credits, you should change "staring" to "starring", and then add "Spell checking by Douglas Kaden".

this is cool mate, always good to find more reasons to use ODE's and see some MATLAB code - what is a display anyway but a matrix?

Bacteria: What is my purpose? Lauren: You run doom. Bacteria: ...Oh my god

hint: it's not I-D soft (just like you pronouce "idea"), but id, as in id-ego-superego. Not and "I" more like "E".

"Wow, low frame rate. Dell E-Machine?" "No, E Coli."

Ok but hear me out - this would be great for TAS runs. Afaik, TAS runs commonly just slow the game down a lot soo...

wow, insane that you got Dick Wolf to executive produce for this! ;)

Did I miss the part where she plays doom on the cells?

now combine both the trained cells and the cell screen and we got something truly amazing

Próximo passo é fazer isso com átomos!!!

Sooner or later we will be able to play Doom on an actaul liveing Cuttlefish by modifying its cromatophores somehow. Trust me, its gonna happen.

Is it possible if the On/off signal on which the florescent starts glowing is done late/intermittently so it can produce shades of grey instead of just black or white?

i was expecting cells playing doom, but to be honest, the fact that we started as single celled life at one point and now we can run doom on cells i mean ofc it would be doom but this is lovely fascinating

I can't go to work. I have doom

As a millennial in a low level systems analyst role, seeing a gen Z student at MIT shitpost in this way for her final project makes me feel like the kids are gonna be alright after all. Unironically amazing work, I’m sure the guys making a PLC out of crabs are shitting their pants right now. In all seriousness though this type of work is important in my opinion, and ensures the value of science and technology is valued by important people who may not understand it but are responsible for finding it regardless. Great video!

But you are not running Doom on cells you are watching Doom through cells, thing is unless you find a way for enough cells to interpret 1's and 0's to run a computer program then it's not technically running DOOM, what you did here it's basically a poop oled screen lol

This was gold, Lauren. Got me a good laugh. Keep creating and continue to have fun. Far too many people forget about the play when working, and thus, working becomes a drag. "Running Doom on actual cells, about 600 years." - Can't wait!

Correct me if I'm wrong, your are no running the actual game, like the game engine, your are just displaying the frames using cells right?

Cant wait for the full colour release of cellular doom

JOE MAMA

Excellent! Nice work! This is the exact type of thing I went into biology for. :)

Id, dear. Not I.D.

90s: wow, this game is so advanced. My PC can barely run it 2020s: let’s see if bacteria can run it

marry me 💍💐

Playing Doom on sepsis sounds like hell mode

Is life a joke to you?

Groundbreaking human engineering

That executive producer joke was written for me specifically. I love you! Lmao

These are the kinds of curiosity we should have rather than being curios of what our neighbors are doing with their lives.