How Many Crabs Does It Take To Run 'Doom?' 16 Billion Of Them

Scientists have successfully built logic gates by using swarms of soldier crabs. Now, we know exactly how many crustaceans we would need to run to Doom on them.

On Tuesday Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, made a series of tweets about storing information on old devices and in unusual ways, tweeting about how a hard drive built in Minecraft could store as much information as 37 punch cards from the 1970s — about one kilobyte worth.

A tweet is about 1kb of memory*. All of the pictured things can store one tweet:
Two Babbage Analytical Engines
37 punch cards
A Russian woven electronic core memory module
This hard drive built inside Minecraft

*280 characters of up to 4 eight byte octets each in UTF-8. pic.twitter.com/PdYqV9A48l

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 16, 2021

In the thread, Mollick mentioned a 2011 paper written by a group of scientists who built a simple computer by exploiting the swarming behavior of soldier crabs in a geometrically constrained environment.

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

But can this "crab computer" run Doom?

According to a calculation made by Twitter user @NORMALHOROSCOPE, it potentially could. Provided you had a little over 16 billion crabs and an immensely large environment to build it.

YOU CAN RUN DOOM ON 16,039,018,500 CRABS https://t.co/MMj7Nggtwe

— NORMAL HOROSCOPES (@NORMALHOROSCOPE) March 17, 2021

Here is an idea for your next science fair. Running Doom on things that are not really supposed to run anything, let alone the 1993 video game, has been a popular thing to do among tech-savvy people on the internet since at least 2006. Just in the last six months, we saw Doom being run on a pregnancy test and on a calculator powered by literal potatoes.