Show HN: I Turned DOOM into a Transformer

Quick start · Walk a digit · The museum · How it works · What is checked · Films · Docs

Quick start

doomformer doctor checks your setup. It builds ACC, the ACS compiler, if it is missing. That needs git, cmake and a C compiler. On Fedora: sudo dnf install git cmake gcc gcc-c++ make.

Walk a digit, DOOM reads it

The marine holds FIRE and inks the floor. Then he presses READ.

1,355 voodoo dolls in the same map run an MNIST network. The winning digit's doll crosses a line. That line lights the digit on the display.

Python reads back 248 values and checks every one. With --digit, Python presses the keys for you. Without it, you walk and draw yourself. Full output

The float model scores 97.58 %. The network also trained on the strokes the scripted marine walks. Details · Film

The museum: rewire one connection

Step on seven floor pads to light a digit. Press READ. 136 voodoo dolls run a tiny network and light the answer.

Press MUTATE and the level rewires one connection while it runs. The same 7 now reads as 1. You can watch it happen: one doll stops at its gate.

How it works

One layer, from dolls to dolls:

• A teleport cancels lines a doll crossed earlier in the same tic.

doomformer facts checks these in about 10 s. Engine facts · Engine features it needs · Other ports

Computers in DOOM maps are not new. counter.wad counts with voodoo dolls, conway.wad runs Game of Life, and Danny Spencer's calculator adds numbers. New here: a compiler for neural networks, and an exact check on every value. Related work

What is checked

Every run compares each value the map exposes with NumPy. That proves the inputs that ran, nothing more. So the repo also attacks its own check:

The MNIST map exposes 248 values. It does not expose its 903 staircase counts and 1,351 gate comparisons. Those are checked only through the sums they feed. Fuzzing and tests found four bugs in the compiler. All are fixed. Verification

ACS level scripts move gates, rewind the dolls, sense the world and copy results out. Two do more. df.Agent takes an argmax in ACS. --opt 3 copies each layer's values into the next layer with a script. Per demo

Commands

Times are from a 16-core arm64 Linux machine. Every command

Some outputs are picked. DEMON CANYON, the name --nightmare writes, is one hand-picked sample. ask gets 94.7 % of its training questions right, and 35.4 % of new wordings.

Bigger experiments

His brain is the level. The level senses the nearest demon. 1,345 voodoo dolls of the marine run his brain and pick an action. The level turns him and fires. Python only steps the clock and reads. 50 of 50 decisions are exact. Film · Code

He is not playable. One decision takes 22 s of game time, and the demons are frozen while he thinks. With the demons awake (--live), he dies in 5.5 s without a kill. Live demons

Build your own

Compile a network into a map. Let its outputs open doors, flash lights or shove the marine. This runs as pasted:

df.MLP.from_torch converts a PyTorch model (example 02). The world and actions hooks wire outputs to doors, lights and thrusts (example 03). Guide · 12 examples · Show and tell

Many games at once

One map runs in one game, on one core. df.run_many spreads inputs over many games, or over a Ray cluster. A network can also be split into tile maps, one per layer. Then Python copies values between them.

More

Limits

• Slow. A small MLP runs about 23,000 times slower than NumPy. Most of the time goes to idle conveyor belts. Speed

• ViZDoom first. Other DOOM engines ran only small maps.

• Picked samples. Showcased seeds and names are picked. The list

What's in the box

Licensing

Code and docs: MIT. Data keeps its own licence (THIRD_PARTY.md). The level-name lists come from the Doom Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0) and id Software's source (GPL-2.0). The 100 sample MNIST digits are CC BY-SA 3.0. The fruit-fly circuits in models/fly come from the FlyWire connectome (CC BY-NC 4.0, non-commercial). Freedoom graphics are BSD-licensed. DOOM is a trademark of id Software / ZeniMax. This project is not affiliated with them.