Very interesting, never heard of this. I love Hacker News for being able to learn something new from comments. Although I cannot agree with labeling "horizontally nanocoded CPU" as "No instruction set". There are instructions, they are just low-level.

I wonder, can Turing machine count as "Zero Insturction Set"? Technically there is no sequence of instructions.

That's a fair criticism.

I think this article describes it better than I could and I get why they chose that name:

https://www.lsmarketing.com/LSMFiles/9809-ai1.htm

Haha these are really interesting.

It seems to program with such a reduced instruction set requires one to be either a genius or a computer (i.e. generated code). I'm neither :(

Either that, or a compiler with such an instruction set as the target.

For instance:

https://github.com/arthaud/c2bf

It seems like this is a frivolous subject, but it is actually quite enlightening to realize just how little is required to get something that computes, it changes how you view the whole concept of computation.

Someone wrote a C compiler that generates code using only x86 MOV instructs.

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator