4 ms·

An unusual hardware architecture: APA (Associative Processing Array)

53 points by blasdel 15y ago

ctdonath 15y ago
Such minimal computing designs are delightful. Ever since hearing of "reverse subtract and skip if borrow" as a one instruction architecture, I've dabbled in the study, if not progressed to my satisfaction. This is another wonderful addition - if I could get my mind around it, having just suffered the effects of watching "The Omega Man". Any links to coding examples?
- kragen 15y ago
  Like hugi-compo? The latest competition was in 2009, and the winner generated a random ASCII-art maze with a 122-byte MS-DOS .COM file. http://www.fysnet.net/hugi/compoold.htm http://www.fysnet.net/hugi/compoold.htm A 2006 competition was for Sudoku solvers; the winner was 67 bytes. And of course there's a whole demoscene with 32-byte, 64-byte, 128-byte, 256-byte, etc., categories. My dissection of a 16-byte graphics demo (the smallest!) is at http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/demo/fr-016.html http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/demo/fr-016.html. In April some of us were playing with bootstrapping a development environment in MS-DOS from COPY CON: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2011-April/thread.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2011-Apr... http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April/000519.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April... Dave Long put together a version where the machine code was entirely printable ASCII. Brian Raiter wrote a lovely article a few years back on the smallest possible ELF executable, which turns out to be 45 bytes, which unfortunately has been broken by recent Linuxes: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm... Based on Brian's work, I wrote a self-compiling compiler for a tiny dialect of Forth: https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth which is about two pages of code if you remove the comments. I also wrote a PEG compiler-compiler in JavaScript which is one page of code: https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md --- ultimately I want to make a version that generates StoneKnifeForth code instead of JS, but I haven't gotten around to it. I also designed a minimal CPU architecture: https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis but I only have software implementations for it so far, and no interesting code. And I wrote a metacircular interpreter for Bicicleta in half a page of code, which I guess is some kind of "minimal coding example": http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-February/000450.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-Febru... https://github.com/kragen/screenfuls https://github.com/kragen/screenfuls is a collection of tiny, readable programs that do interesting things.
  - wtracy 15y ago
    Okay, now someone needs to build a Calculus Vaporis CPU in Minecraft.
wtracy 15y ago
This would be an interesting starting point for a mechanical computer.

53 points by blasdel 15y ago

Such minimal computing designs are delightful. Ever since hearing of "reverse subtract and skip if borrow" as a one instruction architecture, I've dabbled in the study, if not progressed to my satisfaction. This is another wonderful addition - if I could get my mind around it, having just suffered the effects of watching "The Omega Man". Any links to coding examples?

kragen 15y ago
Like hugi-compo? The latest competition was in 2009, and the winner generated a random ASCII-art maze with a 122-byte MS-DOS .COM file. http://www.fysnet.net/hugi/compoold.htm http://www.fysnet.net/hugi/compoold.htm A 2006 competition was for Sudoku solvers; the winner was 67 bytes. And of course there's a whole demoscene with 32-byte, 64-byte, 128-byte, 256-byte, etc., categories. My dissection of a 16-byte graphics demo (the smallest!) is at http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/demo/fr-016.html http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/demo/fr-016.html. In April some of us were playing with bootstrapping a development environment in MS-DOS from COPY CON: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2011-April/thread.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2011-Apr... http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April/000519.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April... Dave Long put together a version where the machine code was entirely printable ASCII. Brian Raiter wrote a lovely article a few years back on the smallest possible ELF executable, which turns out to be 45 bytes, which unfortunately has been broken by recent Linuxes: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm... Based on Brian's work, I wrote a self-compiling compiler for a tiny dialect of Forth: https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth which is about two pages of code if you remove the comments. I also wrote a PEG compiler-compiler in JavaScript which is one page of code: https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md --- ultimately I want to make a version that generates StoneKnifeForth code instead of JS, but I haven't gotten around to it. I also designed a minimal CPU architecture: https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis but I only have software implementations for it so far, and no interesting code. And I wrote a metacircular interpreter for Bicicleta in half a page of code, which I guess is some kind of "minimal coding example": http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-February/000450.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-Febru... https://github.com/kragen/screenfuls https://github.com/kragen/screenfuls is a collection of tiny, readable programs that do interesting things.
- wtracy 15y ago
  Okay, now someone needs to build a Calculus Vaporis CPU in Minecraft.

wtracy 15y ago

This would be an interesting starting point for a mechanical computer.