Doom - Blog Posts

Happy Pi Day!!

Today I've got an obligation to talk about John Carmack's work on 1993's Doom! The Doom game engine utilizes pi to generate its sine, cosine, and tangent lookup tables. It's done this way because generating all those numbers at the start and then keeping them in RAM was more efficient than trying to generate those numbers on the fly, and for what id Software were trying to do at the time, that efficiency was a must. Where things get interesting is that Doom's version of pi is actually a bit off. Instead of the correct 10-digit version of 3.141592654, John Carmack misremembered it as 3.141592657, and so that ended up being the version of pi that Doom uses. Considering it's only wrong at the tenth digit, fixing it results in a change that is pretty much imperceptible, although I think it's a fact that's still worth sharing. Maybe it's a bit silly, but it gives me hope knowing the incorrect version made it into the final game. It exists as a reminder that for how revered the team members of id Software are, it's people who made Doom. And those people are prone to mistakes just like you and I are. But that didn't stop them from making something incredible, and I have no intention of diminishing their accomplishments. If anything, I hope we remember this mistake as a means to bolster our confidence and to have faith in the endeavors we pursue. Anyways, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day!

Rose

Standing on the center of worlds

Where doom burned down the wall

A daemon which no living holds

Accursed born of war

Dancing ashes of the dead

In air burning dispair

Fruitless to the gods they begged

Their ending lives unfair

Into the city of the damned

A daemon stands ever guard

His mace of living darkness slam

His judgment struck all hard

Blend into the very air

The voices of dispair

And from the ashes yet arose

Hope in the shape of a rose