This isn’t Doom. It’s a neural net’s hallucination, based on a visual memory of Doom, played eternally by an AI agent tasked with surviving a growing deluge of imagined fireballs.Created as part of a research project on ‘dream’ learning for AIs, we have the opportunity to not only observe, but play these snippets of mechanical dreaming, which AIs can, theoretically, train themselves on before being exposed to the real thing.The heart of this experiment is two AIs: A neural network capable of visually learning a basic game scenario through observation and creating its own hazy, interactive impression of the mechanics, and a second AI given a goal within this ‘dream’. While the exact mechanics are horrifically complex, the paper by David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber goes into extensive detail on how it all works.As broken down in AI enthusiast Janelle Shane’s observations on Twitter, the imperfect nature of the dream created has led to some unusual learnt behaviours from the practical, game-survival side of the intelligence. Over time, it has learnt that by moving in certain ways, it can cause fireballs to just pop out of existence. The AI has, in its own simple way, become a lucid dreamer able to exploit holes in its own memory to its advantage.