For some reason, scientists have theorized that 16 billion soldier crabs could run the original 1993 version of the first-person shooter DOOM.
In recent years, DOOM has become the go-to game for being run on obscure hardware, with the latest theoretical PC coming in the form of 16 billion crabs. Based on a recent study, it seems that the combined efforts of 16 billion crabs may be able to recreate the original first-person demon shooter. While this vision may seem jarring to even the most aquatically-friendly gamer, rest assured this is only theoretical.
DOOM is a classic video game, so much so that the game continues to be rereleased on modern consoles 28 years since being released. Even with its blocky graphics and simplistic controls, the game continues to attract retro gamers who long for its gameplay. The success of DOOM has spawned a number of sequels, remakes, comics, tabletop games, films, and novels. DOOM is considered to be a major milestone in video game history, launching the popularity of the first-person shooters’ genre to what it is today.
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According to Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, DOOM can theoretically be powered by the joined efforts of 16 billion crabs. Back in 2011, a group of scientists published a paper in the journal Complex Systems 20 describing the use of soldier crabs moving through plastic structures to recreate logic gates. From this study, Mollick has theorized that if enough crabs were used to implement enough logic gates, there would be enough memory to run the 1993 version of DOOM.
Scientists have also successfully built logic gates by using swarms of soldier crabs. It takes about 80 🦀 to operate a logic gate, and there are 8 logic gates in a byte, so 640,000 crabs can be used to store a single tweet. Which seems kind of horrifying. 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀 pic.twitter.com/j7JlC1lsyu
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 16, 2021
Mollick bases this on the idea that it equates to eight logic gates in a byte, with 80 soldier crabs needed to run a single gate. That means that running DOOM would take a combined effort of 16,039,018,500 soldier crabs. Fans can thank Twitter user Normal Horoscopes for crunching the numbers, calculating the bytes to crab formula that has brought us all this wonderful discovery. Incredibly, a computer made of crabs might not even be the lowest-tech device that DOOM has run on before.
Over the years, the 1993 version of DOOM has been proven to run on many different pieces of hardware, including smart fridges, pregnancy tests, ATMs, graphics calculators, Apple Watches, a Macbook touch bar, a Sony k-800i, a 1998 Kodak DC260, and even inside DOOM itself. There’s a whole community online on Reddit dedicated to finding new ways to run the old school game on. Perhaps the subreddit’s combined efforts could find a way to gather the required amount of crabs to run DOOM.
Source: Ethan Mollick/Twitter
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