3 ms·

i just want to know what possesses a man to do such a wonderful thing, and to even know if such a thing is possible before pursuing it i would also watch a 128

by swyx 3y ago

i just want to know what possesses a man to do such a wonderful thing, and to even know if such a thing is possible before pursuing it i would also watch a 128 hour livestream of him coding it because how do you even start

Semaphor 3y ago
> i just want to know what possesses a man to do such a wonderful thing My impression is, that they are an artist who just happens to use a medium not normally (directly) used for art: Code.
mtreis86 3y ago
> and to even know if such a thing is possible before pursuing it I'm not the creator of that magnificent piece of programmatical art. But I can take a stab at this. As long as the languages are Turing complete it is possible. Any Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine so once you step up to that level the challenge is keeping your head through the maze of nuances between many of those languages. I think the logic behind it goes something like this, if a language is complete (eg in the Gödel sense) then you can have it produce things that are nonsense in its own language. Anyways I would expect the bulk of the work to be making those incremental step of going from each language to the next. In terms of data shape, I am thinking a linked list. So the final step is to call them all in a nested fashion, bootstrapping each up onto the top of that stack as you go.
- internetter 3y ago
  Oh huh you're absolutely right. Start at the bottom, work your way up
- BoppreH 3y ago
  The quines are not simulating each other, they are just printing a string after some formatting (which usually involves embedding a copy of the string into itself). There's no Turing completeness needed (most of the quines don't even have branches), much less Gödel encodings.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > they are just printing a string after some formatting There's (at least) one language in quine-relay that's not that simple: Piet. It's a visual 2D language written as an image file. https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html
rattray 3y ago
He's got a book! ...in Japanese. I hope someone can help him translate it into English so more people can learn about this kind of thing and he can be rewarded for his adventures.

by swyx 3y ago

Semaphor 3y ago

> i just want to know what possesses a man to do such a wonderful thing My impression is, that they are an artist who just happens to use a medium not normally (directly) used for art: Code.

mtreis86 3y ago

> and to even know if such a thing is possible before pursuing it I'm not the creator of that magnificent piece of programmatical art. But I can take a stab at this. As long as the languages are Turing complete it is possible. Any Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine so once you step up to that level the challenge is keeping your head through the maze of nuances between many of those languages. I think the logic behind it goes something like this, if a language is complete (eg in the Gödel sense) then you can have it produce things that are nonsense in its own language. Anyways I would expect the bulk of the work to be making those incremental step of going from each language to the next. In terms of data shape, I am thinking a linked list. So the final step is to call them all in a nested fashion, bootstrapping each up onto the top of that stack as you go.

internetter 3y ago
Oh huh you're absolutely right. Start at the bottom, work your way up
BoppreH 3y ago
The quines are not simulating each other, they are just printing a string after some formatting (which usually involves embedding a copy of the string into itself). There's no Turing completeness needed (most of the quines don't even have branches), much less Gödel encodings.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > they are just printing a string after some formatting There's (at least) one language in quine-relay that's not that simple: Piet. It's a visual 2D language written as an image file. https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

rattray 3y ago

He's got a book! ...in Japanese. I hope someone can help him translate it into English so more people can learn about this kind of thing and he can be rewarded for his adventures.