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I never realised you could encode each column of Doom as a single character, but of course you can! I suppose the one thing missing would be distance, but if you get 8 bits per character I you could reserve the upper bits to represent approximate distance.

That's weirdly inspiring! What other games can I make where the visuals are conceptually no more than a line of characters, but which can get macroexpanded into immersive graphics?

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Another point to note is that you aren't stuck with a single character to encode a column of Doom as text. You could also do something like a letter to represent the content, followed by a number to represent the distance.

I think the only weird part about that is that certain letter-number pairs may be a single token with some other semantics in the model, and other letter-number pairs would be a pair of tokens. I think that could impact the performance of the model (but probably not by a huge amount).

I suppose the save states of a game are a compressed representation of the world to a degree.

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