How AoE2 is helping scientists understand ants
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- Опубліковано 8 тра 2024
- In this video we'll look at an academic study which used Age of Empires 2 to simulate battles between ants and explore Lanchester's Square Law.
The Study (published in PNAS): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
Written by Dr. Samuel Lymbery, Dr. Bruce Webber, and Dr. Raphael Didham. Edited by Dr. Douglas Emlen.
More informal explanation of the study written by one of the authors (Dr. Webber): www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Arti...
Check out more cool stuff at Australia National Science Agency's UA-cam channel: www.youtube.com/@csiro/videos
Photo credit of the ants taken during the study: Dr. Bruce Webber.
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Patreon: / spiritofthelaw
Background music from Epidemic Sound: www.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition - Ігри
My read is that the native ants need to focus more on upgrades and possibly spec into the archery range to have more units in combat at one time
No! They have to build walls!
Have to get some BBCs
this comment should be in top 5
🤓☝️ achktually, if the meat ants get the knowledge to add onagers to their military strategy, battles on chokepoints will be always in favor of the meat ants, onagers got more value than any type of archers or anti infantry ranged unit (need to be carefull wirh friendly fire tho)
they need to use armored beetles to ferry their warriors to the enemy's town center quicker, then just meat ant death ball the whole lot of the argentines.
man straight up applied lanchesters law better than the paper lmfao. absolutely incredible.
This video could've been a paper by itself! SotL really underselling himself...
Well he's the Spirit of the Law after all
he is a mathematician irl you know..........
Somebody contact the authors and get SotL as co-author of a follow-up paper
He literally made a public peer review of someone else's paper for our entertainment :)
I wonder if the scientists that researched Lanchesters Law eventually stumbled across your video when researching because it's the most popular video on the topic which then gave them the idea to get aoe2, or maybe they are just men of culture and have played the game before.
At a guess, the study writers aren't familiar with the game. I can't imagine many who are familiar leaving no upgrades on late game units while new players can easily miss that part
@@tychozzyx9439I don’t think that creating the optimum build for their Teutons was important to them in this specific study 😆 it’s not indicative of whether they’ve played the game before or not to me
@@tychozzyx9439 what you just said is really dumb
@@NYK01 I think they just needed an excuse to charge a gaming PC and a copy of AoE to research funding. They wanted to complete the study ASAP so they can go play some games, so they didn't bother with upgrades (or even the correct linear attack method to compute the relative strengths of individual units).
>gets in your department
> Starts a research on ants
>charges you a 5k gaming pc and AoE copy
>elaborates a paper
>leaves@@greenjelly01
2035: SotL is granted the Nobel prize in economics due to his video about wheelbarrow timings being crucial to end world hunger. In his acceptance speech, he thanked his Patreon members, and gave 5 fun facts about elephants.
Flemish revolution is still the UT of Burgundians.
Love the content man. Keep up with the good work!
I accidentally crashed my economy with flemish revolution yesterday
I accidentally used Flemish revolution once. A better U/I would have maybe prevented that.@@flakstruk-8481
And he started his speech with "Hey guys, Spirit Of The Law here."
He concluded his speech praising the Saracens Team Bonus
I'm marking this comment and will revisit in 2035. I suspect you are a time traveller.😂
As a biologist who does modelling, I agree with the conclusion that the AoE2 part had little scientific benefit but helps outreach. The actual experiment where the ants fights is simply a better way to test this as it also takes things like injury and fatigue of the Australian meat ants into account. The LS vs. TK is a simple case where input == output, but I have seen the article mentioned in several places, so the AoE2 part seems to be doing its job.
Just thinking out loud here...maybe simulate castle age obuch against elite Teutonic knight to incorporate injury /some kind of attrition 11? But then again, nothing better than to observe the ants fight against each other.
The simulated battles might have been part of a compromise with the ethics committee. Presumably they had to keep the number of real battles to a minimum so the simulated ones are used to increase the amount of data while the real ones test the validity of the simulation.
I could see it useful insofar as "This is the kind of testing environment we'd like to create, let's see if our hypothesis has legs before we move to live trials."
@@sourathghosh5170 while that’s a nice idea, I feel like if you are going to use aoe2 for the study, it’s probably best to use like they did as a framing device. In that case, it’s probably best to keep it simple and use simple units and mechanics. The majority of people reading the paper will probably recognize both the name and model of a Teutonic knight, and a two-handed swordsman tells you everything you need to know about it in its name. An obuch is probably far less known and it’s probably not immediately apparent that it can strip armor.
@@sourathghosh5170 I would actually think that if you want to use it for something other than PR. The best way is to first let them fight IRL to get a benchmark of their performance. Then tweak the stats of units until the outcome is similar. Then you have "modelled ants" to resemble real-world ants. I think then you can make maps in the scenario editor to resemble different levels of environmental influences, such as habitat destruction, different levels of food (units spawn to replace losses) etc. and see which species has a competitive advantage. This way you actually use AoE2 for something you probably cannot do in real life due to the cost of setting up all these habitats.
Its interesting, but from what I can see the biggest nail in the coffin of the meat ant is probably the fact they couldn't get the ants to battle in the small scale skirmish's, the meat ants simply lack the aggression of the Argentinian ant and aren't taking the smaller battles that they can win and the Argentinian ant isn't taking the fights it would lose so they just coexist until the Argentinian ants have enough workers to outnumber and overwhelm the bigger ants.
So goths vs teutons, goths overwhelm with numbers, teutons tower and defend.
Eventually goths will overwhelm the teutons with numbers.
So, in other words, they need better "Open Map" strategies. More rushing, harass, maybe some castle drops... maybe if there's a couple of native ants that work well together, one can play pocket.
@@omargoodman2999 Since this is pretty much already late game, Teuton ants probably should utilize more siege ants so they could punish late game number game done by Goth ants better
@@temkin9298 More aptly:
Teutons are just vibing and slowly building, while Goths are turtling until they have their full mass army.
Teutons COULD'VE countered all of that beforehand, but they just aren't playing agressive enough.
Or in other words, while one is playing Age of Empires, the other is just plaing Sim City.
@@omargoodman2999 Me witnessing as TheViper's trained meat ants ride tarantulas to the Argentine Ants to snipe the males then perform an anthill drop
Never in a million years would I have thought that this game would be used in such a way!
It isn't the first time a video game has helped scientists. The corrupted blood incident in WoW was studied by epidemiologists and the CDC to model disease spread among populations.
I would happily indulge future videos like this. Your scientific expertise of Age of Empires might very well lead to you being cited in future ant research!
I kinda want to see Spirit colab with someone like TeirZoo. I don’t know if their styles would fit, but it’d neat to see.
Spirit et el
I hope you contacted the researchers over their calculations errors. As a biologist this is absolutely fantastic content!
Yes! I'm an environmental scientist and I would love it if somebody took an interest in my research with feedback and suggestions!
I don't think so... for me they applied according to real life models, NOT FOR THE VIDEO GAME. I don't know if I'm explaining myself well or not... :(
I think they calculated the relative strengths based on Teutonic knights fighting several swordsmen at once rather than one after the other because they could do the same with ants, having one Australian ant fighting several Argentine ants at once. Since ants don't have stats nor HP meter, having Australian ants fighting Argentine ants one after the other would probably estimate the ant's stamina or injury probability.
@@chienbanane3168 I agree that is probably the reason they did it that way but having a way to estimate the relative strengths, when you do not have ideal data, that work better with Lancaster's formula is a useful idea.
erroneous calculations are necessary in advancing civilization
The study that we never knew we needed
But we sure as hell deserve.
analogous to the calm species that always existed in say europe or asia, versus the other invasive human species that came from africa, the two CANNOT coexist no matter how much they try to melt them together
That '4.5x stronger'-error is such an university classic. So much effort is put on formatting the paper correctly that hilariously large errors go completely unnoticed.
it's specially weird here because the numbers they got from it are really off, should have tipped them something might be wrong. But I guess the specifics of the aoe2 part weren't their focus
I must also add, that the wording '4.5 times stronger' is also bad, as it literally means '5.5 times as strong', but is meant to say '4.5 times as strong'.
@@Ribulose15diphosphat I don't agree with that one. You'd never say '1 time stronger' if you meant '100% stronger' or 'twice as strong'. '2 times stronger' would always be interpreted as 'twice as strong'.
@@oyuyuy Once the absolute numbers get below 1, things change: 20% more clearly means 120% total and not 20% total, as this obviousely wouldn't be more but less.
@@Ribulose15diphosphat No, nothing changes above or below 1. If you want to say '120% as strong', you could say '1,2 times stronger'. '20% as strong' means '0,2 times the strength' i.e. 80% weaker.
You're mixing this up with percentages, where '120% stronger' isn't the same as '120% as strong', but the original example has nothing to do with percentages.
'4,5 times as strong' is '450% as strong' or '350% stronger'.
This video epitomizes why Spirit is an absolute gem in the AoE community. Thanks for making this video, it might have been "unusual" as you said, but it was truly fascinating.
Videogames contributing to science is a thing of beauty.
Like WoW aiding economist and that one time epidemologists.
what's the context on the latter? I mean economics I can see, but
@@YataTheFifteenth I'm pretty sure there's is a video about that. IIRC, due to a bug a debuff started spreading between players and pet through contact. Some researchers used the data to predict de contagion of a desease and the behaviour of the human population. They concluded that humans are morons and won't listen to specialist suggestion in a pandemic situation... What a spoiler.
@@YataTheFifteenth The corrupted blood incident en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
@@YataTheFifteenth I'm assuming the epidemologists relates to Blood Plague. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
@@YataTheFifteenth I think it is about that plague during LK prepatch that killed players in capitals
Two of my favourite niche interests at once?
The fact you're correcting the actual scientists makes this magnificent
I was really hoping I'd hear about an ant monk rush
Or ant douching..
Or an ant treb war..
Or the ant version of the viper
ah yes, the famous Antcatraz fastwall
Native Australian ants keep getting dautcastled
Or DauT Anthill
I mean, the Argentine ants are already at Imperial age gothing their way out there
ah, the famous HoAnt rush strategy, eating the first enemy's Queen on its way
This is excellent, please never hesitate to deviate from what would be considered as "expected" within your content field, because this was a blast.
I can't help thinking that the AoE component of the study was probably the influence of the grad students. I think a great follow-up episode would be to actually get an interview with the scientists involved in the study. I think the biggest unanswered question is whether it was AoE that influenced this study or if it was Spirit of the Law's videos instead.
That's a great idea!! I'm pretty sure the researchers would be up to doing it!
@AntonioZL honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they were already fans of sotl. They clearly have more than a passing familiarity with the game if they are using the scenario editor to run simulations of Lanchester's Law and knew that it could be used to simulate it.
In my experience, a lot of younger grad supervisors will encourage their students to explore something gimmicky
It brings press attention to the PI and helps them climb the academic ladder
I wouldn't be surprised if the research supervisor suggested using AoE2 to model ant behaviour 😅
The AoE2 part was definitely a thing to help with the reach of the study, given how popular AOE2 is, though using a game to simulate battle scenarios is not really that crazy of a concept, so kudos to them for making that decision XD
Mind blowing, it's well known that structural complexity of habitat is correlated with increased abundance and diversity of spiders. I somewhat assumed it was to reduce competition for space between spiders but it never occurred to me that simply offering more choke points might better protect them from wasps attacks (there has been a recent wasp invasion here in our southern forests, but it hasn't had the immediately negative impact on spider diversity and abundance we were expecting. This offers a new avenue of thought!).
I did almost all the play balancing juggling for AoE2, ably and strongly assisted by Kevin Holme. I want to state outright that I absolutely and consciously used the Lanchester principle in balancing the units. Just as Spirit of the Law says though, we couldn’t just use them straight, which led to many months of testing.
I’m excited that Spirit noticed what we did! And even more that myrmecologists used our work!
Legend
Having a friend recently give his PhD defense, this was really cool to see AoE2 applied in higher academia. Thanks for showcasing this!
it's not thaaaat common, but RTSs have been used a surprisingly amount of times in academia, sometimes as a computational tool; sometimes as the topic itself.
i mean. this shit looks like serious waste of time, effort why would you need to know how ants fight? how that helps humanity to progress? we send ants into other planets and try to get rid of whatever small sh,it that could be dangerous?@@AntonioZL
Ants are a pollinator, like bees, and the loss of the Meat Ant would create a gap of sorts to the Australian Ecosystem, as the animals above it in the food chain would be affected. It might not help us progress, but if we don't care for Earth long enough for us to establish self-sufficient colonies on other planets. The idea of the tests as far as I can tell, is to understand why this larger, stronger ant is losing ground to the hordes of tiny, weaker ants that are invading its home. And eventually, I imagine knowledge of how such creatures of Earth handle things on Earth, will help pave the way for the sciences of creating the Martian, and other planets' equivalent.@@QWERTY-gp8fd
@@QWERTY-gp8fd They are trying to stop the invasive species of ant killing off the native species
@@QWERTY-gp8fdit literally says that the invasive species cause billions of dollars of loss economically
I bet someone was caught playing AoE2 when they were supposed to be doing research and had to come up with an explanation of what they were doing and here we are
Never would have thought that Spirit of the Law would find a flaw in a scientific paper. I'm proud of you :D
I think you're overestimating the accomplishment of finding flaws, scientists aren't perfect which is why peer review and reproduction is important.
What the hell. Antkeeping and aoe are two completely different hobbies I love, never in a million years was I expecting this...
real.
One particular day I was resting on a hammock and under me was raging the the most ferocious battle between red ants and black ants. It was like witnessing two medieval armies gather together and fighting on a pre-determine battle field. It was absolutely fascinating I even remember calling my grandmother to come over and observe it with me.
Despite AoE helping mostly with wider scientific outreach, it is still no small feat; scientific studies and public attention can greatly benefit each other. Great video, cool research, great stuff all around.
This is the best piece of science journalism I have ever seen. Spirit of the Law goes over the paper in a clear way for laypeople while being critical of the paper's limitations and fair with the paper's contributions. Brilliant!
I love how you not only covered the study, but also provided a sort of peer review!
I love ant battles tbh. I hope they make an Age of Ants RTS game
If I learn programming I will make a kurzgesagt like ant game.
AoE2, melee only
Reminds me of the shows Decisive Battles! It did a similar thing using Rome: Total War to help visualize ancient battles. Like with this study, using the game didn't really add anything new, but the recognition and publicity from using a popular game to visualize things helped with outreach and likely got more people interested.
One of the biggest issues with argentine ants in specific (besides the ones seen in the paper) is the fact that their mega colony strategy makes them INCREDIBLY hard to get rid of. While most other species will fight for resources against nearing colonies of their species, argentine ants will more often than not join into a mega colony. Now you have two nests helping each other, each with their own queen (or queens! since this species is capable and prone to multi-queen nests, unlike a lot of others) fighting against colonies that are already fighting each other.
Awesome stuff, thanks for posting about the study and reviewing it in detail!
I think that AoE2 is an excellent game for this study. The amount of control that the scenario editor offers is insane and probably what led them to choose it
First thing I've thought of is... pathing.
I like how Spirit of the Law actually read the study and analyzed it instead of just talking about it. More people need to do that with studies. You'll rarely find a study without flaws and whether or not the flaws affect the main results of the study and in which way are important to understand.
For example, sometimes a study's flaws cancel out the results that are found. Sometimes, they downplay the results. I have seen people dismiss studies because a flaw they could not control downplayed the results, so the results must be meaningless.
Anyway, the fact that Spirit of the Law pointed to this flaw as well as to how it affected the numbers makes me respect him quite a bit.
awesome. hope you share this video with them so they can refine their study.
I can't tell you how overjoyed I am by this video. I've played AOE2 since 2000, and I've always found Lanchester's Square Law to be fascinating (and then was delighted to see your video on it a while back), and my professional background is in biophysics but I have an intense interest in the behaviors and neurochemical signaling systems of ants - especially Argentine Ants. This brings so many different things I love together in such a bizarre manner.
I co-authored a paper in PNAS on ion channels using fluorescent synthetic tarantula toxin probes to study neuronal signaling, and I thought it was really cool. I feel totally outmatched by a paper that used AOE2 to study ant fighting dynamics.
Also, there happens to be a massive war between a Carpenter Ant colony and the Californian Argentine Ant megacolony occuring in my backyward and kitchen walls. Life is weird.
I love this so much!! What a great way to help make science more interesting for us non-scientists out here :)
And now we've entered Age of Ant Wars.
Now this is my kind of content. Video games, science, and ants. An unbeatable trifecta.
I'm so glad that you discovered the elusive vegeterian sea anemone!
So that’s what’s been eating all my carrots….
Spirit of the Maths strikes again! Fixing scientific studies is a new one tho (at least from what I have seen of your videos)
thats really cool, thank you for putting in the effort to make this video!
This is an awesome video, hope there are more like it!
Congrats on catching their blip of math Spirit. You are a true intellectual.
Props to them for doing the data entry. It's kind of hard. I was doing my own tests to see what would happen if Dravidians were given bloodlines and knights (but no other upgrades like cavalier) and it takes a long time to click on each unit to check its HP before entering in my table. Worst is when I forget what number I'm entering when I alt tab to go to enter it in excel and I need to go back to the game since I can't do excel and the game at the same time.. These knights... underperform Paladins even Burgundian ones. They did end up doing better than I expected. Outnumbered by Portuguese post imperial arbalests 3 to 1 a fight Paladins easily win, they do lose but if you consider 120 HP of a knight the same as 75 gold and 40 HP of arbalest to be 40 gold, this is actually a descent trade. I could not find a single unit matchup where their unique tech allowed the knights to be better than paladins.
I think there are ways to run the game windowed, if that might help. But maybe even logging the numbers using a phone would be better than alt-tabbing?
I must say that PNAS has been my favorite journal since college. As a chem e, I wanted to be published there and in the Journal of the American Chemical Society so that I could habe JACS and PNAS on my CV.
Yes, I'm a child.
One of my favourite vids from you that’s really well made
This is perhaps the most Spirit of the Law video to ever spirit its law.
My enjoyment of SoTL videos increase exponentionally with the amount of math in them! This was a peak video!
I play Teutonic knights and that is exactly my strat. Corner sit, castles, skirms, spears, trees and walls for choke points, stay off the coast. Spend gold on upgrades, ignore high cost units, only focus on food and wood units until gold is massed. Watch as 500 horsemen die to 30 halbards and a castle. I am no good at math, but I know how to make a last stand and tip the odds
Just here to say I appreciate your videos. Everything is so well made; interesting information, fun facts, fun wordplay. You’re a champ.
If Lanchester's square law suggests the exponent should be 2 for planar fighting and the linear law suggests an exponent of 1 for constrained (i.e. 1D) fighting, does it suggest cubed numbers for 3D fighting?
In that case, the fact that AoE2 has 1.5~1.7 tells you about the effective dimension of the pathing, which is funny. I wonder if there are other ways to measure this dimension -- e.g. density scaling with a circle of units with increasing radius -- to compare these values.
The square in the Lancaster's law has nothing to do with 2D/3D fighting. The square law comes in because the assumption is that the damage dealt per unit time is proportional to the size of the army (i.e. when every soldier of the army is attacking). In the case of the linear law, the assumption is that there is a constant amount of damage dealt per unit time (for example, at a choke point where only a constant number of soldiers can engage).
4:01 I wil nitpick but I am sure I hear thespians on Thebans. And I am positive these actors are true forgotten heroes of that battle
Ab-doubles
There were 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans in Thermopylae. Thespiae was an ancient city in Greece. Thespians as in actors comes from the legendary first actor named Thespis and is unrelated to the city.
Interestingly, I first got aware of Lanchester's Law while reading Winnetou. The protagonist got into a trial by combat, and because he was a famous warrior, he was sentenced to fight with 1:2 odds against him. They had to fight with javelins, he alone against two enemies, all holding 5 javelins each. Then he explained that it is unfair as he is really fighting against 1:4 odds: he had 2.5 javelins per opponent, and his opponents had 10 javelins in total against him. He still won in the end, but it was an interesting illustration that a 2x numbers advantage against him was in fact a 4x advantage.
Yup. People tend to forget that fighting two men one after the other without gap is way different that fighting both at the same time
@@harsh3948 This information is as old as written history. Look up the battle between the Horatii and Curatii.
This was really cool please do more like this!
Spirit, are you a complex system researcher? I am doing my phd in physics and I always loved your videos, how you analyzed this game...now I am totally sure you need to belong to any kind of field related. Really really cool, a friend of mine works in ants modelling as well. Really cool! I love this game.
Ayyy. You've covered it!
Now we all have excuses to not get off AoE. We're, "doing science."
Great video man, haven’t been on the channel in a while. I forgot how much I enjoy your videos
This is your best video so far. Awesome!
Supremecy Ant? 😮
Vamos argentina papá! 💪
De colonia oscura a colonia feudal en 6m PvP
campeones del mundo perri
this was so good spirit of the law i always love when you use aoe 2 to to talk about broader topics like the actual history of the civs but it was neat to see aoe 2 used in an experiment like this
The genius of using popular video games in a study, is that you get the general public interested in peer reviewing your work like this.
It also makes it easier to replicate the results at home.
ANTeresting
Lmao google gives me an option to "translate" the comment to all caps "interesting"
“elmanhux has been banned from the server”
Haha, PNAS
What an incredible video you have over here. Well done.
What a great video! As an academic and AOE2 fan who used to live in Australia, this is super interesting. I absolutely love you highlighting this paper and adding to its findings. Great.
I had been looking forward to your cover of the article 😊 and it did not disapoint😊
Amazing.
Thank you for making this video!! To learn that it was NOT clickbait immediately kinda knocked my socks off.
2:10 "Without being too specific, all around the pacific" I can totally see you reviewing your own script saying "Oh man i always wanted to say that."
my favourite sotl video in ages! Thanks so much!
This is genuinely fascinating
Woah, Ive never seen someone reference Sim Ant before. That game was the best. I loved the endgame where you got to battle across the house for dominance
This video is an excellent intersection between a number of my interests, absolutely awesome 💯
Whole video is so interesting to watch!
Very informative, I really enjoyed and appreciated this.
I love the peer review process. Releasing the methodology allows for perspective the authors wouldn't have expected. Science is beautiful
Meat ants are pretty common where I live! They are good ants, too! They are big, and have a painful bite, with a very distinctive "flavour" of pain, but they will only attack you if you disturb their nest (which you won't do on accident, since they build large mounds of sand & gravel), and they almost never seem to enter houses. They are also one of very few native Australian species that can eat the notoriously invasive Cane Toad's poison unharmed. I would have never expected them to be brought up on a Canadian's AOE2 channel...
Hopefully, we can help Meat ants win the war, and drive out the invading battalions of Argentine Ants.
weird how the difference from chokepoints changes so little as the group of smaller ants gets bigger
you would expect chokepoints to have a greater effect the larger the enemy numbers
Well, they're ants, not a trained phalanx. Exhaustion and the ever-increasing amount of wounds from the endless barrage of cannon fodder ought to add up over time.
Plus ants can walk on walls, which diminishes the effective usefulness of chokepoints.
thanks for this, that was really enjoyable!!!
I can't believe how awesome to know that a strategy video game I grew up with has ultimately been used for scientific publication and research in a significant way. Thank you, Spirit Of The Law! From
Your fellow subscriber since 2016!
Bless you. You are a treasure to this community
Take time to appreciate the scientists using the single coolest unique unit for the meat ant. They knew what was up.
It was the ants' use of trebuchets that was the most surprising thing.
'What is this? A video for ants?!'
Fascinating stuff, thanks
Scientist: "I'm a professional scientist and here's a bunch of math."
SOTL: "I'm an RTS nerd. Here's where you got the math wrong."
Really enjoyed this one! Thanks
Some scientist: uses scenario editor to simulate and analyse fights
Sprit Of The Law: 'You dare oppose me, mortal?'
SotL is a marine biologist? Damn thats cool
You can write your observations to this scientist and help them with next study)
Or just email link to the video)
That was a very well presented video on a scientific topic made on a channel focused on AoE2. As a scientist and fellow AoE2 player and enthusiast I strongly approve!
Brilliant presentation, thank you
I watch a fair number of science and math videos and I also just downloaded AoE2 about a week's ago (so I've been watching a handful of videos on that). I really love when the algorithm works.
I'm happy this study is now a part of the Spirit of the Law antology
I love the exploration here. Super interesting!
Excellent video, great work!
This is so interesting. Your channel is a gift to the world. Thanks SoTL!
A scientific article is discussed and basically peer reviewed with relevant critique on a video game UA-cam channel. What a time to be alive!