I Turned DOOM into a Transformer
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Instead of trying to run DOOM on things, I have instead decided to use DOOM (many, many, many doom games actually) to create a transformer. For a lot of the math required I essentially had to use DOOM game mechanics and voodoo dolls (DOOM is turing complete btw) and exchange them with the actual operations, essentially creating an alternative to NumPy (a 65000x slower one). Thus, I am proud to present DOOMFORMER. Here are a list of things DOOMFORMER can do :It can classify MNIST digits, even if you write these digits on the map!It can talk(kinda)You can use it to make decisions, so, it can play DOOM. Yes! You can play DOOM with thousands of DOOM games now! The marine's mind can be controlled by DOOM, playing on a map generated by DOOMFORMER. Truly, the possibilities are endless, and even larger-scale training of DOOMFORMER could be done on a measly T4.If anyone would like to help me scale this up and make crazier things, I'd love to work together.
HN · launched Oct 29, 2026 · 132 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views
Niche: indie video games · 179 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▲ +24% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
Could you build this?
No Building a transformer out of DOOM game mechanics is a novel, research-level engineering hack requiring deep knowledge of DOOM's internals, fixed-point arithmetic, and computation in game logic.
What it would actually take: The project needs a reverse-engineered DOOM engine, a way to encode numerical operations in its mechanics (triggers, voodoo doll positions, sector movement), and a compiler or toolchain to map neural network math onto those mechanics. It is a bespoke research and systems effort rather than a conventional app, so it requires expert low-level and ML knowledge.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: nostalgia.dev DOOM-in-transformer post
Concerns raised: requires deep DOOM knowledge to understand
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 151 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #16 of 152 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 363 days after the earliest competitor.
- I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language · hn · 2026-04-28 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- DOOMER DROP · ph · 2026-10-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- doomsharp · github · 2026-10-13 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- DoomPunks · ph · 2026-09-27 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- TTF-DOOM · hn · 2026-04-06 · 68 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- EternalVR · github · 2026-09-28 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- DOOM in the kernel, or fibers in eBPF · hn · 2026-09-09 · 53 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Doom (1993) Playable in a GitHub Readme · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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