While many people mistake rats for vermin, rodents are actually highly intelligent animals.
Now a rat owner has shown how “incredibly smart” his pets are by teaching them how to play video games.
Viktor Toth, 30, conducted the experiment to prove that rats are great decision-makers and can be just as smart as humans when playing the shooting game Doom.
Rodents Carmack, Romero and Tom, named after the video game’s creators, were able to independently navigate a series of mazes, open doors and even shoot at monsters.
A rat owner has demonstrated how “incredibly smart” his pets are by teaching them how to play video games
Viktor Toth, 30, conducted the experiment to prove that rats are great decision-makers and can be just as smart as humans when playing the shooting game Doom
How do the rats play Doom?
Mr. Toth placed the rats on a moving ball in front of a computer screen so they could play Doom in first-person perspective.
To train them, the rats were rewarded with sugar water when they turned in the right direction.
By rewarding the rodents, Toth eventually taught the rats how to navigate the game’s levels and attack approaching monsters.
Teaching the rats to shoot proved more complex.
Mr Toth originally planned to teach the rats to bite a tube in front of their noses to control the game’s shotgun, but found this to be ineffective.
Instead, he opted for a righting movement that required more attention from the rats.
The neuroscientist from Budapest, Hungary built the virtual reality (VR) setup to test how smart rats are.
He said: “I built a rodent VR setup from scratch and automatically trained three rats.
“Rats are incredibly smart, on average, and can be taught complex tasks.
“You have an exceptionally good memory and a special understanding when it comes to high-level thinking and decision-making.
“Rats can be taught very complex tasks and I wanted to teach them to move in the right direction of the game without my interfering.”
“To train them, the rats were rewarded with sugar water when they turned in the right direction.
“I put them on a moving ball that allowed them to play the game in first person – it took a lot of effort to teach them how to walk on it, but we managed it in the end.”
At first the rats only played games with straight passages and simple curves.
However, as they started to get the hang of it, Mr Toth introduced more complicated routes involving dead ends and random turns.
“I would take them off the ball when they were stressed and play with them,” he explained.
To train them, the rats were rewarded with sugar water when they turned in the right direction. By rewarding the rodents, Toth eventually taught the rats how to navigate the game’s levels and attack approaching monsters
Mr. Toth placed the rats on a moving ball and allowed them to play Doom in the first-person perspective
“By the end of the experiment, they ended up being my pet rats, and I spent at least an hour with each one every day.”
Teaching the rats to shoot proved more complex.
Mr Toth originally planned to teach the rats to bite a tube in front of their noses to control the game’s shotgun, but found this to be ineffective.
Instead, he opted for a righting movement that required more attention from the rats.
By rewarding the rodents with their favorite treats like grapes and bananas, Viktor eventually taught the rats how to navigate the game’s levels and attack approaching monsters.
He said: “It works well when the rat has to be in the character from the first person perspective.
“By the end of the experiment, they ended up being my pet rats, and I spent at least an hour with them every day,” Mr Toth said
“Rats can be taught very complex tasks and I wanted to teach them to move in the right direction of the game without my interfering,” Mr Toth explained
“They can perform most of the actions in this game, but it would be interesting to teach them how to switch weapons and why they would need to do this in different situations.
“Right now I’m not sure at what point they get overwhelmed or just enjoy the rewards or perform the actions.
“They know what they’re doing – if I change the environment randomly, the rat understands and adapts to the new environment it’s in.
“They are very curious creatures and are very keen to find out what is going on.
“If the task is complicated enough, the rats start enjoying it — at least that’s my own hypothesis.”
Next step, pig craft! Scientists teach pigs how to play VIDEO GAMES
Last year, researchers from the US taught four pigs to manipulate a joystick with their snouts and move a cursor on a screen to reach one of up to four target walls.
Each of the four pigs demonstrated some conceptual understanding of both the game and the connection between joystick control movement and the cursor.
This is despite the fact that pigs are far-sighted animals with no opposable thumbs — an achievement the animal behavior experts called “remarkable”.
“It’s not an easy task for an animal to understand that the behavior it performs has an effect elsewhere,” said author and animal behavior expert Candace Croney of Purdue University in Indiana.
“That pigs can do this to some extent should make us think about what else they can learn and how that learning might affect them.”
Pigs are capable of learning simple video games, scientists have demonstrated, showing the animals are smarter than thought. Pictured, one of the Yorkshire pigs in the study uses its snout to manipulate a joystick to move the cursor on the screen