Master of Doom
If you're not familiar with the book Masters of Doom, I recommend reading whenever you have some spare time, it's a captivating story, on how Doom the game was born and the life journey of his author.
The Drama with Doom
A little side track here. If you're not aware the internet has a little fetish of running the game Doom on anything, literally the only requirement is to have a screen of some sort. If you google it a bit, you can easily find examples, like in a Porsche 911, a fancy Vape 💨, a digital camera 📷, even inside the game minecraft (game-ception) 🕹️, hell even on a pregnancy test 😂! So naturally somebody had to try running Doom in/with AI. All because the legend John Carmack, has made a revolutionary game for the time, inventing some first ever 2.5D techniques back in the day, which were so performant it left the world jaw-dropped 🤯.
Anyways, back to the future 🏎️. Google has trained an AI model to play the game Doom, and based on the training data they could generate the game in real-time 😳
That's a pretty incredible achievement. A dedicated model, on somewhat limited hardware (1 TPU v5), was able to generate a level of Doom in real time, with monsters, shooting and all of that. See for yourself ⬇️:
From the video we can see, it's just 20FPS, and sequences are just about 3 seconds long, but hey it's a start. The engineers say it can run at 50FPS, but the quality is going to suffer considerably.
This makes me dream tho, what is the future of gaming going to look like?
Just imagine in GTA 10 or whatever, you'll be able to run through-out your own world, that is going to be adjusted to your own play style. Let's say you want to drive a lot, through the jungle, and fight gorillas from planet of the apes, the AI will basically be able to generate all of this on the fly. Because underlying any game are just pre-defined graphic models, and physics, but the model can easily learn how to generate them as well maintaining the style. It can even evolve with time, so everybody basically starts from ground 0, but over time this could evolve into entirely different worlds! 🤔 – damn this sounds like the Matrix.
The gaming of the future is going to be fantastic! So excited about it.
