DOOM Using Regular Expressions

Hackaday reports that a developer named Artem Lytkin has gotten DOOM running using nothing but regular expressions — the text-matching tool that programmers use for pattern searching and substitution. Regexes are theoretically Turing complete, meaning they can perform any computation, so it's technically possible, if wildly impractical. Lytkin's implementation uses a ninety-six point six megabyte text string representing a CPU's registers, RAM, and a compiled DOOM engine, with a C driver applying thousands of find-and-replace rules to generate each frame. At eighty thousand substitutions per second on his test system, it takes more than ten thousand regex operations to render a single frame, but the result is surprisingly playable. The project is more proof-of-concept than practical tool, but it's a striking demonstration of what you can do when you treat a text-processing system as a universal computer.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton