Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: 'These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut'

When Borderlands Science was announced back in 2020 I thought it all sounded a little silly. Science? In my Borderlands? It struck me as a lot less likely than Dr. Mayim Bialik seemed to think. But it turns out that I was the silly one all along, because McGill University, the institution leading the project, says the project was in fact a massive success that will «substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in future.»

Science in Borderlands does not occur through the usual gameplay, but rather by way of the Borderlands Science minigame embedded in Borderlands 3. That's what really drove my doubts about the whole thing. Borderlands is all about shooting endless truckloads of dudes—how many players are going to step away from that to put time into a non-violent minigame?

Roughly 4.5 million of them, as it turns out. «These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health,» McGill said in a press release. «This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles which represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet.»

With the project now safely concluded, McGill can apparently now admit that it was a little uncertain about the whole thing too. 

«We didn’t know whether the players of a popular game like Borderlands 3 would be interested or whether the results would be good enough to improve on what was already known about microbial evolution,» said Jérôme Waldispühl, associate professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science and senior author on the study, published today in Nature. «But we’ve been amazed by the results. In half a day, the