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Play Pacman, Pinball, and Pong With a Paramecium
An anonymous reader writes "Science is rarely ever this cool! 'Physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team from Stanford University have done just that by creating versions of classic games that you can navigate by physically controlling living organisms. A game called PAC-mecium is Pacman with a twist: players use a console to change the polarity of an electrical field in a fluid chamber filled with paramecia, which makes the organisms move in different directions. A camera sends real-time images to a computer, where they are superimposed onto a game board (see video above). By looking at the screen, a player can guide the paramecia to eat virtual yeast cells and make them avoid Pacman-like fish. A microprocessor tracks the movement of the organisms to keep score.' Also available are versions of Pinball, Pong, and soccer."
Some higher species might be doing the same thing with us humans.
disgusting. they are life too.
go to i95 or you rlocal 8 lane highway, play frogger for real
since frog muscles will respond to electric jolts after death, do it with a dead frog, so PETA can't complain
then you have something even better than the classic arcade: zombie frogger
or, more in style with the electrical bolts and mad scientist-messing-with-life theme here: frankenstein frogger
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's a version in the works that Plutocrats use - it uses real life human beings. Apparently, buying ball clubs and getting their bitches in Congress to do their bidding isn't enough. They want direct control: push joystick button and get Congressman to vote "Nay". Move joystick to next Congressmen and press button for another vote.
Ball games will use poor people that have had their jobs sent overseas and I hear the current volunteer military is half way to what they want: they're able to get young people with absolutely no job prospects (regardless of the amount of education they have) to join the military to pay their student loans. They're just working up to controlling individuals ......
Can I play Combat with it? That way, I can pull the good ol' "shoot-him-through-the-wall" trick and then watch when it gets all pissed off and throws the controller at me.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
...I've seen in a while. It doesn't even excite the geek in me. I could do the same thing with dryer lint and superimpose a game on top of it. Woooohoo! Dryer Lint plays Pac Man!!!!!!
In before PETA drama!
*reads comments in the FA* ...crap.
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Wake me up when I can play Smash T.V. with live puppies. "Good luck... You'll need it!"
If you hit their modem line and hack into, another game will be available, "Global Biological War", but i remember that the only way to win is not to play it.
The researchers at Stanford University were dismayed when told by the department head that they needed to shut the project down after receiving a cease and desist letter from Capcoms lawyers stating they were committing copyright infringement.
Remember "Micro-Golf" from the Secret Agent Super Dragon episode?
It's minigolf played on a microscope with paramecium and other microscopic organism:
[skip to 5:12]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZMn6sZa-js
is that the first game looks nothing like Pong, but rather, Breakout.
Hey that actually sounds doable. Other games in IRL might be named "Warcraft: Bashing and Costume Drama" and "Snake: Fruits on a Plane". This list should be extended, IMHO. :)
When I first saw the article I said "cool!", but then a little voice in the back of my brain whispered "hold on, aren't they torturing those poor things?"
Seriously - scientists manipulating live paramecia by running the voltage around them up and down to play video games? Now, I don't know about you but if I were a single celled organism being used as a human's plaything in this way I think I'd be trying to figure out how to morph into the next Spanish flu virus to get my revenge...
as the token vegan and animal rights activist let me just say that I greatly appreciate the respect people give when comparing concerns about the treatment of animals that are capable of suffering (dogs, pigs, cows, etc) to...paramecium. Nothing says you know you're wrong better than overblowing a comparison to silly, extreme levels to try to defame your opponent.
While I happily eat pigs, cows, fish & all sorts of meat, I'd never kill them or torture them for fun ( ok I've done it as a kid, but who hasn't). Of course there's a difference between pigs and paramecium, but the idea is the same, and the 'capability of suffering' threshold is very very vague, like arbitrary. Using living things for research, I'm totally ok with that. Eating living things as we're higher in the food chain, I'm totally ok with that. Harming living things for fun is not cool - Uncoolness factor being proportional to living thing complexity.
If I said "duck vaginas" would anyone know to what I'm referring?
This creeps me the fuck out on a base level.
This gives new meaning to "Pac-man Fever".
GAMER!
*points to user name*
I would have been up for playing games with you guys whenever - you just had to ask!!!
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
Where's PETA?
They're cute little creatures. Run around on the microscope slide like an over-eager dog. Why would anyone want to torture one for a game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramecium
I'll be impressed when they manage to pull it off with only one mecium.
If you have a problem with directing the growth and movement of single-celled life, then I'm guessing you must consider growing ivy on a trellis to be some form of slavery.
For crying out loud, it not only doesn't have a nervous system, it doesn't have an ANYTHING system. If this is the level of life at which human interference is considered cruel, than I hope you don't eat.
Or shower. Or walk or breathe too heavily. Or defecate considering what /that/ does to millions of single-celled lifeforms in your own body.
Pain is entirely the creation of a nervous system, and suffering is the creation of memory of pain.
A paramecium does not have the capacity for either. It can react to stimulus, but it lacks the capacity for deciding on a conscious or subconscious level whether such stimulus is pleasant or not in the same way a single transistor is incapable of running a program.
This game could easily be hacked to connect the controller directly to the game. That would be unfair to all those who achieved a decent high score using the paramecium-webcam interface.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!