Engineers, researchers, and all kinds of intrepid hobbyists have proven that the classic first-person shooter Doom can be played on just about anything, including lawnmowers and even gut bacteria. On Wednesday, Adrian de Winter, principal application scientist at Microsoft, confirmed that popular AI chatbot ChatGPT can play Doom — just not very well.
Seeing what devices and other contraptions can run DOM has become an increasingly popular pastime for hackers, researchers, and tech enthusiasts. To make Doom work with ChatGPT, de Winter combined it with OpenAI's multimodal GPT-4V (Vision) to make the chatbot play the game.
The results of the Doom/ChatGPT test show that despite the improvements in GPT-4 and improved contrast in vision, the AI model could not run Doom independently due to input and rendering limitations.
“For example, if the model falls into a pool of acid and gets stuck on the wall, it ‘forgets' that it's being damaged by the acid,” de Winter said, “and then gets stuck and dies.”
Another issue De Winter faced was the AI model's habit of thinking and explaining its actions, or lying about completing an action. That leaves Doom's Space Marine at the mercy of the monsters.
GPT-4, de Winter explained, was able to reach the last part in the game… but only once. Doom's simplicity, due to its portability, makes it easy to work with, and its open-source nature allows better metrics for measuring intelligent agents because Doom requires hard reasoning skills – like real-time temperatures.
“It's exciting!” De Winter told Decrypt GG. “It's mostly used as a meme (‘Can my toaster run Doom?') because of its portable and open source code. That's why it remains the game of choice.
De Winter emphasized that the project was undertaken solely in his capacity as a researcher at York University and had nothing to do with his work with Microsoft.
“Editing took a lot of time. I regularly dropped frames and went over them just to make sure nothing was broken,” he said, pointing to persistent problems, including the model trying to exit the map through the window. “I finally gave up and turned the frames into GIFs.”
De Winter's project is the latest in a series of attempts to play Doom in unusual locations.
After the launch of the Ordinals protocol last year, a stripped-down version of Doom was written on the Bitcoin blockchain as Inscription 466. Earlier this year, the same project added a full version of Doom to the Dogecoin blockchain.
While this AI experiment to play Dom may be a one-off, de Winter says he has ideas for future game experiments using large-scale linguistic models (LLMs).
“My main research interest is related to LLM's reasoning and planning skills, so games, in general, are an excellent testing ground for this,” he said. “At the moment, strategy games are a little off the table, but I'm thinking that simpler games (or other models) might do better.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
Stay on top of crypto news, get daily updates in your inbox.
