A Mind Is Born (256 bytes)

By now when I see "linusakesson.net" I upvote without reading, then I read TFA and watch the vid (or listen to the music in this case). I'm never disappointed. Speaking of which I plan to do something really cool: I've got a "time capsule" C64 (well C128 but close enough) and it still works. It's never been "polluted" by anything modern: no "gotek" SD reader, no nothing: just a real time capsule from the early to mid eighties. And I plan to encode, manually, the 256 bytes (yes, bytes) of linusakesson's "A mind is born" C64 demo. I'll then run it (with the C128 hooked to an old CRT, of course), thinking that technically I could have encoded and ran that in the eighties. Mind blowing stuff: [this video]

> DNA is extremely important, but it makes no sense if [it is] not in a cell, in an organism, in an ecosystem. Other interactions are at play, and this application of algorithmic information cannot capture the extent of that complexity. It reminds me of demoscene, specifically "A mind is born"[1], 256-byte demo which "looks" complicated and with rich structure, but it's just nudged/selected random data. Author said that he played around with some random generated content until he found something nice. Just by itself that 256 bytes is still not enough to replicate behaviour, it must be run on hardware, which is like "environment" for DNA. Without several supporting chips which are easy to access, that code would mean nothing and would not generate such complexity. Moreover, those "patterns" in demo are patterns only because WE interpret them as meaningful. [1] [this video]

I am fascinated by these IF engines for some reason. What sets the Dialog apart is, IMHO, the performance it gets on 6502 in combination with the Å-machine VM by the same author. It's a domain specific language + optimized compiler + runtime for a platform (C64) that hasn't been made for decades. There are some excellent Z-machine impls for C64, but basically anything using the Inform7 runtime (a bunch of convenience parsing and world tricks) runs like a dog. Dialog + Å-machines gets a respectable and growing amount of the way there but cutting out the middle man. Linus has some extreme coding cred in my book! [link] [this video]

> and it is extremely complex and does much more Who's to say? The interesting bit in this discussion is why the code size is large, and looking in detail what the programs do would be a start. Of course, one could suppose that using a high-level language makes it easier to write code, hence, more code is going to be written. Or you or I could really conclude anything we want, if we're willing to pretend to know. It would be interesting to know, but that takes work to find out. And I'm a lazy bastard. PS. not to argue any more :), but I have checked the size of rsync 3.2.3 now, it's 51 Kloc of C code (including the 6300 loc of the included copy of zlib). You'd need to add a cryptographic library, a GUI library, and GUI code to make it a viable replacement for Dropbox, without comparing features. Git annex 8.20210223 is 70 Kloc of Haskell and 9100 loc of JavaScript, but it depends on Git to do its work, which (version 2.30.2) is 327 Kloc of C code and 225 Kloc of sh and Perl code. Thunar 4.16.8 is 73 Kloc of C code, sshfs is 4700 loc and fuse is 22 Kloc of C, openssh is 113 Kloc of C, so maybe you could build a Dropbox replacement in 212 Kloc of C without looking through the feature set. Maybe that's still 4-5 times smaller than the Dropbox client, but your number of 50 Kloc is again off by a factor of 4. :) (I guess one could say that the truth is "somewhere in the middle", looking at those number on a logarithmic scale...) I'm sure you could also come up with a much smaller