beefburger

ncurses terminfo can simulate a two-counter Minsky machine, making repeated parameter expansion computationally universal

Wooden prototype: https://seriot.ch/resources/computiles.jpg

Search is working as intended, but the demo only covers Switzerland. It's a bake of the Geofabrik Switzerland extract. Try "Zermatt" or "Basel". You can bake any region yourself from a .pbf: python3 bake.py --pbf glasgow.osm.pbf.

Fair point that the error message should say so. I'll make it read "not found — this demo covers Switzerland only."

No, standard transliterators like Latin-Katakana are designed to always terminate. What the article demonstrates is that the underlying rule language is powerful enough that one could write custom rules that loop infinitely.

In practice, the ICU implementation does limit the number of rewrites, even though the specification doesn't.

I've been wondering for a while if anything in Unicode could accidentally compute. It turns out that UTS #35 transliteration rules are Turing-complete. I show how to compute Collatz with just 3 rewrite rules running on stock ICU.

Indeed. The Jira rules implement test-then-decrement correctly, but the notation was ambiguous. I’ve fixed the pseudocode so that the test explicitly precedes the decrement. Thanks for the careful read!

RFC Esolang is a programming language in which the specification document is the source code.

Requirement levels like MUST, SHOULD, and MAY act as control flow. Section numbers define labels. Packet-diagram labels serve as registers.

Executing RFC 9379 outputs the powers of two. Pre-existing RFCs MAY parse as valid programs, forming a historically accidental standard library.

How to install a Tic-Tac-Toe game on your printer by copy-pasting a few lines in PostScript.

Solvers and visualizers in Python, C and PostScript

I've been experimenting with PostScript programming over the past two years, creating several small games (Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Sokoban and Tetris) all running in Ghostscript or directly on printers. Here are my annotated slides about this quirky and fun journey, filled with insights, code snippets, and lessons learned.

How I shrank Takashi Hayakawa's 33 years old tiny ray tracer by 33 bytes

I've just implemented Tetris in PostScript, pushing the limits of a document-processing language to run a realtime game. It works in GhostView on macOS.

* 600 lines / 10 KB * 69 different PostScript operators, no external libs * Realtime input, direct drop, increasing speed levels * 7-tetrimino random bags * Nintendo-style scoring and high score tracking

This project builds on my earlier experiments with PSChess and PSSokoban.

It show that PostScript is a lightweight, expressive, and surprisingly interactive programming language. A perfect tool for hacking on unexpected platforms.