Hey everyone,
You’ve probably seen the headlines lately: “DOOM running on a quantum computer” or “Biological neurons playing DOOM.” It’s cool and it definitely makes a buzz, but what does it actually mean for us Flame Artists? Are we looking at the next big shake-up for our workstations?
To kick things off, here’s a quick breakdown of what’s really going on behind the hype:
1. The “Quandoom” Case (Quantum Computing)
Don’t be fooled by the headlines. This isn’t a real quantum machine running the game in real-time. The Quandoom project is essentially a clever software workaround that rewrites the game’s code into quantum logic gates.
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The Reality: It needs 70,000 qubits to run, which is way more power than we have today. It’s basically just a clever simulation running on a regular PC.
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For Flame: Think of it as an extreme stress test. If we ever manage to get this kind of computing power (or even hybrid processors) into our workflow, we’re talking about a massive leap in how we handle complex fluid sims or massive datasets.
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Source: Hackster.io - Luke Mortimer Proves Doom Really Will Run on Anything
2. The “Biocomputing” Case (Synthetic Biology)
Cortical Labs recently made waves with their “CL1” interface. They basically grew 200,000 human neurons on a chip to “teach” them how to play DOOM using electrical stimuli.
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The Reality: It’s not your typical sequential code. This is all about biological, adaptive learning.
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For Flame: Imagine an Action node that doesn’t just rely on keyframes for a matchmove. Instead, it “feels” the camera movement through intuition, much like we do when we’re trying to judge depth in a shot.
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Source: Tom’s Hardware - ‘200,000 living human neurons’ on a microchip demonstrated playing Doom
Toward a New Era for Flame
The “Quantum DOOM” stories are fun, but the real question is how this stuff actually ends up in our favorite “Hub.”
Flame is already the heart of the finishing process, especially with all the ML nodes we’ve got now. In the future, it might not just calculate things. It could interpret them:
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Real-time Physics: Moving from “good enough” simulations to perfect, instant physics right inside Action.
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Semantic Tracking & Roto: Having the scene analyzed instantly so that rotoscoping becomes a “one-click” job, no matter how messy the footage is.
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8K+ Pipeline: Using compression based on information theory to handle RAW masters as smoothly as we currently handle proxies.
References (for the curious)
If you want to dive deeper into the tech:
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Future of HPC: NASEM - Quantum Computing: Progress and Prospects
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Biocomputing Potential: Nature - The Promise of Biocomputing
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AI in Flame: Autodesk Flame Documentation & AI/ML Features
The Big Question
If Autodesk announced a partnership tomorrow to bring a “quantum” or “neuromorphic” accelerator into Flame, what task, currently a major chore or a bottleneck, would you want to see become a single button in your Batch?
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“Real-time” physical simulations in Action?
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Perfect, dynamic rotoscoping with zero keyframes?
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The ability to relight any 2D element as if it were native 3D?
I’m curious to hear your take. Is this just cool sci-fi, or are we closer to the future of compositing than we think?