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Esoteric Nonsense and Other Ramblings
Personal blog · calabi-yau.space/blogprogrammingculture
Esoteric Nonsense and Other Ramblings is a personal blog at calabi-yau.space about programming and culture. Since 2019, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times, most often “But can DOOM run it? Programming Satan's computer”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's post on why DOOM is Turing complete, and the idea of building computers inside games. Commenters cite it when discussing DOOM-based computation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- But can DOOM run it? Programming Satan's computer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-08-16
What Hacker News says?
Doom is Turing complete ( https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html ), so it's just a matter of building the appropriate map.
Comment linking /blog/doom.html
on “TypeScript types can run DOOM [video]”Submitted Spelunking in the Turing Tarpit: Expedition Through an Esoteric Landscape as a story · 30 points
HN discussionDoom is also turing complete. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hnQ1RKhbo https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html
Comment linking /blog/doom.html
on “Def Con hacker shows John Deere’s tractors can run Doom”Submitted But can DOOM run it? Programming Satan's computer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLogic in Doom is particularly interesting to me. Apparently you can fit ~64k logic gates in a map (using the method described). From [1]: "As the DOOM engine was not designed to be an interpreter, there are some constraints on our programs written against it. The biggest one is how large our programs can be. Since each gate uses at least one tag, we can use this as a metric to derive an upper-bound on the size of a…
Comment linking /blog/doom.html
on “Accidentally Turing-Complete”Here's some theoretical background on DOOM's Turing-completeness: https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html In the genre of "an implementation of game X on an accidentally Turing-complete Y", it never hurts to bring up Tetris implemented in the Game of Life: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...
Comment linking /blog/doom.html
on “Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom”
