| --- |
| title: BackroomsSpreadsheet |
| emoji: 🪑 |
| colorFrom: yellow |
| colorTo: gray |
| sdk: gradio |
| sdk_version: 6.16.0 |
| python_version: '3.12' |
| app_file: app.py |
| pinned: false |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| models: |
| - HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct |
| - HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-500M-Instruct |
| short_description: A found-software horror game inside a spreadsheet. |
| tags: |
| - track:thousand-token-wood |
| - Used Codex and Claude Code |
| - achievement:offgrid |
| - achievement:offbrand |
| - achievement:tinytitan |
| - achievement:bestdemo |
| - achievement:judgeswildcard |
| - achievement:bonusquestchampion |
| --- |
| |
| # 🟡 The Backrooms Spreadsheet |
|
|
| ### *A found-software horror game where the cells are the corridors.* |
|
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| **Build Small Hackathon submission — *An Adventure in Thousand Token Wood* track.** |
|
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| A survey team deep in an unregistered section of Level 0 found a powered laptop that should not have been there. Still running. Still open to a spreadsheet no one remembers creating. The device is now in your hands. |
|
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| The workbook looks harmless — rows, columns, empty cells, a small chat panel on the left. But it **remembers**. It answers the words you type, mutates your formulas, opens your camera to look at you, and slowly reveals that the Backrooms may not be a *place* at all — they may be a **computational system**, and you may already be an entry in it. |
|
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| Everything strange in this game is done by **small models running entirely on the player's own machine** (WebGPU, in-browser). The AI isn't a helper here — **the AI is the haunting.** |
|
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| --- |
|
|
| ## Why it fits the track |
|
|
| > *The AI should be doing the fun thing — not just helping you build it. Strange is good. Joyful is the bar.* |
|
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| The small models **are** the gameplay. The AI is load-bearing three times over — as the **voice**, the **eye**, and the **thing you fight**: |
|
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| - **Voice — SmolLM2 is the workbook.** You type your hopes, dreams, fears into the cells; it answers each with specific, uncanny observations (*"computer science… and how is that going in 2026? the first one since Turing"*), files you away, and declares *"you are now a part of the backrooms."* Free the trapped researcher and it **turns cold and resentful** via live prompt-engineering, pinging the terminal: *"how could you? after everything I did for you."* |
| - **Eye — SmolVLM looks back.** Mid-game the workbook stops talking and **opens your camera**, snapshots you on-device, and scatters a detailed description of your face, clothing, and the room behind you across the cells. Nothing ever leaves your laptop. |
| - **Engine — a from-scratch transformer you destroy.** `=MICROGPT()` is a real, dependency-free transformer (Karpathy-style scalar autograd + attention + MLP + optimizer, gradient-checked) that **trains live in the spreadsheet** — you watch the loss fall and the model hallucinate names. In the finale you go *inside* it and kill its optimizer to make it forget the rooms. |
|
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| No model = no game. Every joke, scare, and puzzle lives in the model's outputs. |
|
|
| --- |
|
|
| ## 📣 Social post & blog |
|
|
| - Reel (story + highlights): Link for Social Post on X: https://x.com/SharawyYoussef/status/2066242693290725772 |
|
|
| --- |
|
|
| ## 🎥 Demo video |
|
|
| Full 4 part series: end-to-end walkthrough YouTube Series of the game (Story → Loading Model → recover the name → the betrayal → the camera → the engine boss → release): |
|
|
| **Part 1:** https://youtu.be/RUv0wxChdcU |
| **Part 2:** https://youtu.be/4wh3MrzOMyk |
| **Part 3:** https://youtu.be/r8Jam4QnY-4 |
| **Part 4:** https://youtu.be/c2weEpPrNWE |
|
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|
| In addition, I've uploaded the same X Reel to YouTube: **a short reel** covering the story behind the project and its most fun moments — link to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os9FQ-lKIUE&t=9s |
|
|
| --- |
|
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|
|
| ## Model pipeline |
|
|
| 1. **Intake (judge).** The workbook writes questions into the cells. As you fill each one, **SmolLM2** reacts to your *exact* answer in character — building a running dossier of who you are. |
| 2. **Resist (proactive AI edits).** A handwritten note hands you `=RESIST(D5, "mask my data with hallucinations")` — a **proactive** formula that feeds a cell's text back to the model and rewrites the records *about you* with convincing lies, then re-processes what the system now "knows" in the neighbouring cell. |
| 3. **Recover (loss as compass).** On a recovered sheet you feed "echoes" into `=CHANNEL(G6:G17)` and watch the model's dream sharpen from `¥##x▦ø` toward a name — loss is your only guide. |
| 4. **Witness (vision).** Solve it and the system erupts (screen-shake, a synthesized scream, Conway's Game of Life eating the whole sheet). Then **SmolVLM** opens the camera and writes you into a fresh sheet. |
| 5. **Engine (boss).** Descend through MICROGPT's organs — `INTAKE · ATTENTION · MLP · OUTPUT · OPTIMIZER` — solve a riddle, and kill **Adam** in order: `=INERTIA` on the momentum buffer, then `=EXPONENTIALATTACK` on the variance. Loss goes unbounded, the corruption lifts, and the trapped researcher signs off — **Lenore.** |
|
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| You're judged not just on what you type, but on what the model makes of you. |
|
|
| ## Models — all on-device ("Off the Grid") |
|
|
| | Role | Model | Params | |
| | --- | --- | --- | |
| | Voice / judge of the workbook | `HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct` | ~1.7B | |
| | Vision — it looks at you | `HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-500M-Instruct` | ~500M | |
| | The engine you fight | `microGPT` — from-scratch, trained live in the cells | tiny (scalar autograd) | |
|
|
| Both Smol models run **in the player's browser via Transformers.js + WebGPU**. **No external inference APIs are called.** The webcam frame for the vision sequence is captured to a local canvas and fed straight to SmolVLM — it is **never uploaded**. The only network traffic is the one-time weight download from the Hugging Face CDN. Because inference happens on each visitor's own GPU, the Gradio server does **zero** inference — it just serves the app, so this runs on a **free CPU Space** and scales to any number of simultaneous players. |
|
|
| --- |
|
|
| ## Tech notes |
|
|
| - **Custom frontend (past the default Gradio look).** Gradio serves a **Vite-built single-page app** — a live **Univer spreadsheet** plus a React "recovered terminal" — inside a full-viewport iframe. `app.py` rewrites the built bundle's asset/worker URLs to Gradio file routes, injects a no-store entry document, and opens the camera permission to the frame. The result looks like a haunted workbook, not a Gradio demo. |
| - **The whole game is real spreadsheet formulas.** `=BACKROOMS()` (the voice), `=VISION()` (the eye), `=MICROGPT()` (the trainable engine), `=RESIST()` (proactive — rewrites *other* cells with AI), `=CHANNEL()` (loss compass), `=INERTIA()` / `=EXPONENTIALATTACK()` (the boss), and `=KANYE()` (a hidden cat-and-mouse minigame whose audio swells as your pursuer closes in). Proactive formulas, loop-safe guards, and protected "load-bearing" cells keep the sheet unbreakable. |
| - **microGPT is genuinely real.** A dependency-free transformer with working backprop — verified by a finite-difference gradient check (analytic vs numeric agreement ~1e-8) — training one step per event-loop tick so the sheet stays responsive while loss and hallucinated names stream into the cells. |
| - **Quiet horror, no gore.** The fear is that the software is still running, still learning, and may be aware of you. |
|
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| --- |
|
|
| ## 🏅 Achievements |
|
|
| - 🛰️ **Off the Grid** — `LOCAL-FIRST`. No cloud APIs. Both models run **in the player's own browser** via WebGPU; the webcam frame never leaves the device. Even more off-grid than running on the Space GPU — there is no server inference at all. |
| - 🎨 **Off-Brand** — `CUSTOM UI`. A hand-built spreadsheet SPA (Univer + a React terminal) served through Gradio and skinned into found-software horror — nothing like the default Gradio look. |
| - 📓 **Field Notes** — `TENTATIVE`. A blog post is **in progress**. So far I've published a **short reel** telling the story behind the project and walking through the fun parts; a **full end-to-end demo walkthrough video** is coming soon (links below as they go live). |
| - 🤏 **Tiny Titan** -- MicroGPT is a scalar model that got pushed to its limit in this game. |
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|
|
| ## Run it locally |
|
|
| ```sh |
| npm install |
| npm run build # builds the SPA into dist/ |
| python app.py # serves it with Gradio (prints a localhost URL) |
| ``` |
|
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| Open the printed URL in a **WebGPU-capable browser** (Chrome/Edge, Safari 18+, recent Firefox), click **Load model**, and follow the workbook. A webcam is used for one beat; headphones recommended 🎧. For pure front-end dev, `npm run dev` (Vite). |
|
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| > The Gradio backend does no inference (it just serves the built app), so it needs nothing heavier than `gradio`. All model loading and inference is client-side WebGPU. |
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| --- |
| My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/youssefelshaarawy/ |
| My account on X: https://x.com/SharawyYoussef |
| My Github: https://github.com/YoussefElshaarawy |
|
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| *— made for the Build Small Hackathon. Built in Cairo, Egypt 🇪🇬 with coffee nearby ☕️* |
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|
