"AI Plays Doom" Demo Debunked: Text State Input, Solvable in ~30 Lines of Code

banteg · x · 2026-09-16

A viral "AI plays Doom in real time" demo is being called expert marketing. The Jev agent's input is not pixels but a heavily preprocessed text dump of full game state (monsters, items, relative positions, visibility flags), making dodging projectiles trivial — a hardcoded 30-40 line solution would suffice. The showcased navigation shows no real planning or pathfinding, and the touted 10 calls/sec ≈ $7/hour cost underlines how the presentation misled viewers into thinking it plays actual image-based Doom out of the box.

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