June 19, 2026
Wololo, but make it AI
A Perceptron in Age of Empires II
Gamers lose it as Age of Empires II becomes a goat-powered fake brain lab
TLDR: A researcher built working logic circuits and a tiny trainable AI-like system inside *Age of Empires II*, turning a classic war game into a bizarre computing demo. Commenters loved the goat-powered engineering and nostalgia, but fought over whether the paper’s bigger philosophical claims were clever or completely overcooked.
The internet has officially found its new favorite "you did WHAT in a video game?" moment. A researcher built logic gates and even a tiny trainable "brain" inside Age of Empires II—yes, the medieval strategy game where villagers chop wood and armies smash castles. Using the scenario editor, goats, rails, bridges, and a frankly alarming amount of patience, the project argues that if people are going to talk about human-like traits in modern AI, they should think harder about how much depends on the setup and the story we tell around the system. And the community? Oh, they were very much seated for this one.
A big chunk of the crowd was pure delight. Some commenters were instantly hit with nostalgia, with one saying Age of Empires II had barely been on their radar until they remembered its engine also powered Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Others jumped in to praise the game’s old-school map editor as a secret playground where players were basically "programming" long before that became the headline. The vibe there was: this is absurd, brilliant, and somehow completely on-brand for a 2000s PC game.
But then came the spicy part: the paper’s argument. One commenter bluntly called the gates "awesome" but trashed the philosophy around them as "bad," "arrogant," and "uninformed." Another helpfully dropped the working paper link, which only fueled the split between people admiring the stunt and people side-eyeing the big claims. In short: everyone agrees the goat machinery is hilarious genius; they absolutely do not agree on what it proves.
Key Points
- •The article says it proves *Age of Empires II* is functionally complete and Turing complete.
- •It demonstrates an operational NAND gate built in the game using the scenario editor.
- •The NAND implementation represents bits with two rails and uses goats as signal carriers, with ice rails used to manage race conditions.
- •The article describes a bipolar 1-bit perceptron built from two XNOR gates and an AND gate.
- •The perceptron implementation omits an explicit bias term by hardcoding it into the step function and uses duplicated bit-goats for concurrency control.