8 ms·
A Mind Is Born (2017)
- matthewsinclair 6y agoHere's a direct YouTube link to a video of the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8&ab_channel=lftkryo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8&ab_channel=lftkr...
- Aldipower 6y ago"A Mind Is Blown Away" ;)
- yuchi 6y agoFor the record, this is from 2017. A lot of previous discussion happened at the time: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+mind+is+born https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+mind+is+born
- pvg 6y agoSeems like the one thread with comments from that search is just this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907
- dang 6y agoAlso A Mind Is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 - March 2020 (1 comment) There are a few other threads with 1 comment but not an interesting 1 comment.
- jcims 6y agoThis would have given me chills and a feeling of unlimited potential in my life if someone figured it out back in 1983.
- TMWNN 6y agoHow about 1981? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
- eternauta3k 6y agoMakes you think what kinds of things we may find in the space of 256-byte programs. Is there a convincing chatbot there somewhere (sans language training)? Perhaps something conscious?
- indy 6y agoAlthough not quite 256 bytes, here's a chess playing program in 288 bytes: https://leanchess.github.io/ https://leanchess.github.io/
- apples_oranges 6y agoz_n+1 = z_n^2 + c <- fewer than 256 bytes, yet it can be used to produce a beautiful endlessly complex image. To me it almost feels as if God or whoever has intentionally hidden it, in the way everything works I mean, so that we could one day find it. Once we have invented complex numbers for example.. What other secrets are out there? Or rather in here?
- bloak 6y agoThere is probably a 256-byte program that simulates a universe in which a superhuman intelligence evolves. Of course the memory and runtime requirements of that program would be prohibitive, and the superhuman intelligence would not know any human language, because there are more than 2048 bits of entropy in the basic vocabulary of any language (even Toki Pona, I would guess).
- exikyut 6y agoHmmm. This makes me wonder if, in the same way we've been technically-erroneously been hyperfocusing on CPU speed and quantity of memory in system-measuring contests and benchmarks, we've developed a fixation for how little RAM or CPU we can use while doing something interesting. I don't see the same sorts of fights developing around how much disk space we use or what the specs of all the systems we used for preprocessing are. Demos are supposed to be about conquering limitations, right? Inspiring creativity and all that? Well, why can't we add those sorts of constraints in, then? Aren't we smart enough? :P We might even build consciousness one day if we're honest about how much total resources we're using. That way we would actually have to reason about all the bits (no more "GPUs are really *that complicated* that what you're describing is impossible") and there would be no more black boxes. Demos would be interesting.
- oceanghost 6y agoVisually it seems to be a distorted Serpenski Triangle? I'm not sure I'm impressed.
- msk-lywenn 6y agoTo me, the most impressive part is the audio.
- arethuza 6y agoI looked at it for a bit and thought "Those graphics are incredible for 256 bytes" only after watching it for a while did I realise it had audio as well!
- 3np 6y agoThere's the music, as well.
- progre 6y agoLet's see your 256b demo then, I sure that will be impressive
- nervousvarun 6y agoWhat were your thoughts/opinion on the explanation in the technical details of the "How it Works" section? Since you referenced the visuals, and the "How it Works" section details that they were secondary/dictated by the audio...what prompted you to focus on the visuals? Just interested in your thoughts since presumably you read the technical details in the "How it Works" section.
- jng 6y agoIn order to appreciate it, it is necessary to understand the difficulty of implementing something like that on an 8-bit computer from the 80s with 256 bytes of code, which is really impressive by itself. It doesn't hurt its ability to impress that the creation shows a great, coherent artistic vision, which results in an enticing, enjoyable, meaningful viewing experience - which of course is only accessible to people with the required type and amount of sensitivity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _the_inflator 6y agoThis dude is really a C64 genius. For example, his works on sprite crunching is invaluable: https://linusakesson.net/scene/lunatico/misc.php https://linusakesson.net/scene/lunatico/misc.php This effect took decades to be explained in detail like he did.
- userbinator 6y agoThere's also this - hardware-level race condition bug - which he analysed and explained: https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php His site is also full of interesting stuff, not just around C64.
- verytrivial 6y agoAnyone interested in VMs, domain specific languages, and Interactive Fiction will also probably be thoroughly impressed by what he's produced in that domain too (Dialog and Å-machibe). Oh, and he programmed some of the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators 8-bit themed synths. And have you seen the chiptune organ mod? He is not on GitHub/Twitch/itch (much), and self-hosts his blog. I think he likes it under the radar. I hope he's well compensated because he has the skills to become a super villain if need be.
- kruxigt 6y agoIt is beyond my comprehension the unbelievably large portions of intelligence and clear thought that is "hidden" away in obscure places like that in question here. Some people really just want to put their obviously enormous brains to work tinkering on things almost no one will appreciate.
- dgellow 6y agoif you like that kind of demo, Lemmingoffence on youtube is a goldmine: https://www.youtube.com/user/lemmingiFIGation https://www.youtube.com/user/lemmingiFIGation They are still very active and publish regularly.
- grishka 6y agoOh, it's the same guy who made this amazing thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uU4BzSQQmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uU4BzSQQmY
- RicoElectrico 6y agoAnd this, which is even more impressive: http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php
- tyingq 6y agoIt's a little better experience via an online C64 emulator. Download the 256 byte demo: https://hd0.linusakesson.net/files/a_mind_is_born.prg https://hd0.linusakesson.net/files/a_mind_is_born.prg Go to the emulator: https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&lang=en&group=c64 https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&la... Scroll down to "drop file", turn off autoload, upload the demo , turn on sound and fullscreen, then click the "load" button.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pulkitsh1234 6y agoThanks this a lot better than the compressed video on youtube.
- guenthert 6y agoThat is awesome (both the emulator in JS and the demo), thanks!
- tom_ 6y agoSome more 256 (or fewer) byte demos: https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1935 https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1935
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- flenserboy 6y agoReminds me of the old Beagle Brothers one-liners published in their ads, though this is much more impressive, given the size. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros)
- mattstudio 6y agohttps://stevenf.com/beagle/jackzip.html https://stevenf.com/beagle/jackzip.html
- elymar 6y agoIs anyone selling NFT’s of demos? I feel like a Farbrausch would have a high valuation.
- ogrisel 6y agoIf you plan to mint digital art and sell or buy NFTs, please consider low-carbon platforms such as: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ that is based on Tezos and therefore relies on Proof-of-Stake instead of Proof-of-Work to reduce the environmental impacts.
- drcode 6y agoFYI I bought the NFT to "A Mind is Born" today: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php
- ballenf 6y agoWatching on YouTube and suffering through the compression artifacts made me think that the code has reached near absolute compression ratio of the resulting audio/video. Kind of astounding to think that the 720p50 video from YouTube is millions if not billions of times larger than the code that produced it and is still incredibly lossy. (Re: compression, if we're being technical then the C64 machine instructions that the code calls would need to be included in the total. I think?)
- tgtweak 6y agoThere are almost NO moving parts in this video - where a group of pixels could be predictably shifted on the screen between frames with minimal changes - and the frequency that color and intensity are changing means that nearly every other optimization (aside from color-space compression) is thrown out. It is an impressive display of how much video compression optimization is dependent on the fundamentals of the things we are recording/producing in the real world.
- 0-_-0 6y agoIt's easy to create a signal that would be damaged by compression in much less than 256 bytes.
- fortran77 6y agoI wonder how much progress we're missing out on today because few people are hand tuning x64 and ARM assembly language.
- deater 6y agoif you like size-coded demos you should check all of the ones released at the lovebyte 2021 "sizecoding" demo party last weekend http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1935&when=2021 http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1935&when=2021 also look up the byte-battles, the live head-to-head 256-byte programming tournamet
- tombh 6y agoI'd seen this before on HN, and thought about it many times after, but couldn't remember the name, so couldn't find it :( I'm glad to see it again. Personally I see this as a great work of art, perhaps in a way that some people consider great classical pieces of music. Here's a comment from the linked page that poetically reflects that sentiment: This demo is not just technically impressive but I found also evocative of thought and emotion. This isn't just a programming triumph, but an artistic one. The program itself, at 256 bytes, is little more than a "seed" from which the demo (and the Mind) blossoms from. It's so small that the actual execution in memory takes up more space, and watching it play out on YouTube takes up orders of magnitude more; how many dozens of gigabytes were transmitted by all the people who've watched videos of this demo? But what about what we actually see and hear? The visuals start off as Sierpinski triangles, symbolic of both the endless, seemingly-chaotic nature of fractals as well as their order. As the song plays, the fractals become morphed into other shapes. Lines, sharp corners, and occasionally blobs show up, evoking in me images of wrinkles in brains or circuit patterns. The melody is randomly generated but backed by a simple, steady bass rhythm, a similar marriage of chaos and order. The song's climax (at 1:42 in the video) impresses upon me a march of progress as the Mind finally takes shape, formed from random matter and energy and into an entity. We observe the formation of the Mind from the ether not just visually and aurally, but also in the form of the 256-byte seed expanding into the demo flower, eventually taking shape as the C64's home screen.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoyes yes another nice example of why the Demoscene is a great example of digital culture/art and is being submitted to UNESCO in a number of countries to be on lists of world cultural heritage (successfully already in Finland, soon Germany I think) http://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/ http://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/
- NelsonMinar 6y agoThat's my favorite aspect of this demo; I really like the music. Like it legit works as a standalone track, I could totally imagine hearing it at a club. There's a lot of very impressive technical demos whose aesthetics are, well, specific to the demoscene. This is something more.
- SavantIdiot 6y agoI love procedural composition. I got my MFA in the early 90's in electronic music and there used to be WAY more of this happening in the 60's, 70's and especially in the 80's (with MAX on Macs) than today. Clever that he exploited artefacts of the DSP to create the drum sounds. That's kind of how old cheap CASIO keyboards work, by filtering glitches. Sweeping tight filter on you DSP is a trick modern electronic music uses to create a sense of variety in a repeating line. The melody generation is similar to how a Sample-and-hold waveforms create "melody" out of a random feed forward. I remember when Nibble magazine used to have a 2-liner contest at the end of every issue for who go do the most with 2 lines of Applesoft Basic. Beagle Brothers even released a disk of 1-liners, which were really impressive.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agothis gets posted in video or this same link often on here, anywhere from a year ago to 4 years ago here's some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907
- kwertyoowiyop 6y ago“Attentive readers will have noticed that only the low byte of the video matrix pointer gets incremented.” Why yes, hrumpf, of course, anyone would notice that! :-) Respect. As an ex-Apple II programmer I love that old box. But wow the C64 has so many more tools to leverage for demos like this.
- diydsp 6y ago> ex-Apple II programmer I love that old box. But wow the C64 heh, I've been going in the opposite direction. No interrupts on the apple II?! gulp. I guess ppl added a MOS 6526 to their Apple IIes, but none exists in my IIc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- RamRodification 6y agoLinus is a cool guy. Check out the Chipophone. An 8-bit synthesizer built form an old electric organ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1pchpDD5EU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1pchpDD5EU http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/ http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoWhy aren't we (humanity) bundling those up as NFTs and selling them for millions of dollars, rather than tweets and sports videos?
- drcode 6y agoFYI I bought the NFT: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/nft.php
- tpmx 6y agoLooks like Linus Å moved on from Axis (the IP camera manufacturer now owned by Canon) to Teenage Engineering, job-wise. Probably a good move in terms of having more fun at work.
- motohagiography 6y agoHis execution on this is absolutely humbling to see. So awesome!
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past threads: A Mind Is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 - March 2020 (1 comment) A Mind is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907 - April 2017 (53 comments)
- sitkack 6y agoReminds me somewhat of "Bytebeat: Experimental music from very short C programs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg in its compactness. Previously from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063359 see also Ibniz, https://github.com/viznut/IBNIZ https://github.com/viznut/IBNIZ