The brainbot
The brainbot is a chatbot in the December 2022 design of Maxine's Quest, the instrument-control game of Molecular Reality Corporation. The company's technical overview says it would use "a custom chatbot" to "pose and answer interesting questions relevant to the game/experiment session and nanopores in general".[1] On the game's screen it appears twice, as a speaker in a chat panel and as a brain in a green jar.
Appearance
The overview carries a screenshot captioned as "live game play on Maxine's Quest with actual data". The arena is purple and its enemies are small dark green creatures. At the left a parchment-framed chat panel holds a short conversation between two players, who are identified by initials, and the brainbot. The brainbot's two lines read "I require more fungal reproduction agents" and "check out this paper describing fungal spore monitoring techniques". Below the panel stands the jar, the brain glowing green, with an orange alert burst beside it.[1] The first line has the form of a resource warning in a strategy game, and the Protoss advisor in StarCraft (1998) says "You require more vespene gas".
The jar survives in the game's art folder, as four images of the brain at different glows and an orange burst with an exclamation mark. Beside them the folder holds two versions of the chat panel: an empty parchment frame, which the game's script loads for live chat, and one containing the conversation about fungal spores. No script refers to the jar or to the second panel.
Role
The overview gives the brainbot one sentence. The May 2025 draft of the Disclosure Crawl gives it more. It lists "Keltar Chat & BrainBot Assist" among the features of the community hub of Maxine's Quest, and says the brainbot lets players "ask structured questions about uploaded research papers" or "complex scientific concepts".[2] In 2026 the company's artificial intelligence has a different public face, the puppet Keltar, who describes himself as "a puppet with a processor".[3]
Context
The overview is dated December 2022, and OpenAI had released ChatGPT on November 30 of that year.[4] In August 2026 the front page of the company's websites said: "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye."[5] See Everybody's racing to build the brain and Brain lab.
See also
References
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "D&D: Disclosure Crawl (Dungeons & Diligence: Campaign Zero)". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 20, 2025.
- ^ "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ "Introducing ChatGPT". OpenAI. November 30, 2022.
- ^ "Molecular Reality Corporation". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 19, 2026.