Spyke Hunter
| Spyke Hunter | |
|---|---|
 The signal Spyke Hunter was built for: knots in a nylon filament pulled through a hole about 2 mm wide, each one a downward spike in the current (schematic, not to scale) | |
| Developer(s) | demonpore, inc. |
| Platform(s) | The demonpore 64 prototype |
| Release | Unreleased (2020 or 2021) |
| Genre(s) | Molecular game |
Spyke Hunter is the first "molecular game" coded by demonpore, inc., now Molecular Reality Corporation, in 2020 or 2021. It was written for the spikes that appear in an electric current when knots tied in a nylon filament are pulled through a hole about 2 mm wide, a demonstration the company later called knot sequencing. The founder, Kent Kemmish, introduced it in 2026 as "the unfortunately named 'Spyke Hunter', named because I was making a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)", and added: "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"[1]
The game was never released, and no code for it survives in the company's repository. Its descendant is Maxine's Quest, in which spikes in the current through a nanopore summon monsters.
Background
A spike is what nanopore researchers call the brief change in current when something passes through a pore, and a large part of nanopore software is event detection, the hunt for spikes in a long, noisy trace. Spy Hunter is the arcade game that Bally Midway released in 1983, in which the player drives an armed spy car up a scrolling road with a steering wheel built into the cabinet, to an arrangement of Henry Mancini's theme from the television series Peter Gunn.
The signal
The demonstration used the amplifier of the company's prototype reader, the demonpore 64, whose core electronics an outside designer built in 2020 and 2021. A wall with one hole in it separated two chambers of salt water, and a nylon filament with knots tied in it was drawn through the hole. In the founder's words, the recording shows "downward (resistive) spikes as the knots we tied in a nylon filament are drawn through a ~2 mm macropore".[1]
Each spike is a current blockade. Ions can cross only through the hole, so the current measures how much of the hole is open; a knot carries several crossings of the filament into the hole at once and pushes aside more of the conducting liquid than the bare filament does. The hole was about a million times wider than the 2 nm pores through which single strands of DNA are read, and the physics of the signal is the same.
The post gives "at least three reasons" for the experiment: "we wanted to just see if it would work, we were testing the prototype anyway, and because there could be real non-just-educational-value in doing this with smaller and smaller 'strings' as we 'Journey to the Nanoscale', until we're actually sequencing DNA." He called it a "useful way to conceptualize the challenge" and wrote that it was not his plan for sequencing DNA with a solid-state pore.[1]
The game
Kemmish introduced Spyke Hunter on March 29, 2026, in a post to members of EQBio-OS titled "Sequencing a string" and marked "[demo]", which carried a video of the demonstration and of the game. He described the material as the sort of thing members would make themselves: "In the early phases of the quest (traversing the macro to the micro scale) I think our players will come up with a lot of things similar to this that will exist at the border between fun and interesting and maybe just educational but maybe more".[1]
The company's later word for games whose events come from an instrument's measurements is experigaming. Maxine's Quest, put online in May 2026, carries it out with a live nanopore: in its Live Signal mode each monster is summoned by a spike from the company's bench, and the size and persistence of the signal decide which kind of mushroom appears.[2] Ludicious traced Maxine's Quest back to Spyke Hunter in its review of June 2026.[3]
Naming record
Kemmish wrote to members about several of his names on March 28 and 29, 2026. A method from a published paper became "Mambapore" because "I'm a verbal anarchist".[4] He coined "Universal Molecular Streaming" for the company's mission "because it's fewer syllables".[5] A molecular result that needed labels would be the "Holey Grail*", "where the asterisk is 'required labels but it's a damn good start.'"[6] Of demonpore, the company's first name, he wrote that it was among "the three coolest/quirkiest names for a genomic tech startup ever" and that "all three of us wimped out on our cool quirky names".[7] The names are collected in the List of Molecular Reality Corporation puns.
See also
References
- ^ a b c d Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (June 2, 2026). "Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes". Ludicious.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Mambapore". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Magic with labels". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Flossing with DNA". EQBio-OS.