Fish Can Now Play Pokemon!

A fish has been playing Pokemon on twitch for the last few days and it’s amazing.

Catherine Moresco from the University of Chicago and Patrick Facheris from Columbia University are 2 developers who have a dream. Not only do these developers want a pet fish and want to enter a hackathon, they want the fish to be able to play Pokemon. So, they bought Grayson, a lovely little fish, and they set him up a fish tank. They then used a webcam and some motion tracking to let him control the character. Its slow, it’s tedious, and you can watch Ash standing next to a wall for hours, buts it’s just brilliant. The comments in the chat can be excellent and you do seem to get addicted to it quite easily.

Grayson started from the beginning of the game, only controlling the character via his random movements. There are 9 buttons that he can “press” as he swims around. Up, down, left, right, A, B Start, Select and “RANDOMIZE!”. The last button changes the order of the 9 buttons so that they are not always in the same positions. Grayson has actually made some progress. He somehow managed to choose his first Pokemon and even named it “AAAABBK”. He also managed to defeat Squirtle. He then made it out of the house and has been running around town since.There have been some concerns over Graysons health, but we have been assured that the fish sleeps quite often and isn’t in fact dead, they added that his health and safety was their primary concern.

To view the twitch stream click Here. Do be warned though, you do tend to sit reading the chat for quite some time.

Thanks to Twitch for supplying us with this information.