8 HN users recommended this talk6 months2017–2025score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN repeatedly names it as one of the funniest and best talks, a favorite example of absurd computation.
A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.
“Nerding out should always be hilarious like that!” (HN, 2020)
This is very similar in style to my favorite presentation and paper of all time, titled On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [0]. The research, presentation and paper were all created inside of powerpoint and it is probably the greatest thing ever made. If you enjoyed the above video you will definitely enjoy this. [0] [this video]
I think this drives your point with incredible wit: “On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)” by Tom Wildenhain[1]. (5 minutes video) [1]: [this video] (Nerding out should always be hilarious like that!) [2]: Recording of a guest lecture he gave for the Esoteric Programming Languages course at CMU. (~1h) [link]
Witty five-minute talk on PowerPoint's Turing completeness.
On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [this video] Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [link] HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! [link] Zebras All the Way Down [link] Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends [link] Console Security - Switch [link] Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel [link] Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads [link] Sharing the Chisel [link] (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)
The former paper appeared in SIBVOIK 2017 ( [link] ), where you can find other such papers. My personal favorites are "On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint" ( [this video] ) and "Automated Distributed Execution of LLVM code using SQL JIT Compilation" > Following the popularity of MapReduce, a whole ecosystem of Apache Incubator Projects has emerged that all solve the same problem. Famous examples include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pikachu, Apache Pig, German Spark and Apache Hive [1]
For another completely insane but kind of fun way to abuse an office application, see "On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint" [1]. (Gwern has a whole list of accidentally/surprisingly turing-complete things at [2]) 1. [this video] 2. [link]
If you liked the Game of Life running a Game of Life simulation you might enjoy the YT video[0] showing someone's functioning raycasting engine within the game world of Factorio using thousands of machines and parts provided by the game. It blew my mind. What I also found quite amusing was the PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the Turing-completeness of PowerPoint animations[1]. I'll never get tired of this kind of tinkering walking the line between genius and a healthy portion of crazy. [0] [link] [1] [this video]
Amusing demonstration of PowerPoint animations being Turing-complete.
Someone created a bf interpreter using this game: [link] Also of interest may be similar attempts to create computers in other games and applications: OpenTTD: [link] Minecraft: [link] PowerPoint: [this video]
TeX is not a "language"; it's just a tool for typesetting when you want to go the last mile of achieving book-quality printing. The fact that it turns out to be possible to (ab)use its macros (originally designed merely to save the user some typing effort) to do "programming" shows only that it's easy for things to become "accidentally Turing complete" [1], and the cleverness/perversity of its user community. > TeX was designed for typesetting, not for programming; so it is at best “weird” when considered as a programming language. — DEK, Digital Typography , page 235 > In some sense I put in many of TeX's programming features only after kicking and screaming. — DEK, Digital Typography , page 648 > So TeX is a programming language but I had to put in those features kicking and screaming. […] In a way I resent having every language be universal because they’ll be universal in a different way. […] I was really thinking of TeX as something that the more programming it had in it, the less it was doing its real mission of typesetting. When I put in the calculation of prime numbers into the TeX manual I was not thinking of this as the way to use TeX. I was thinking, “Oh, by the way, look at this: dogs can stand on their hind legs and TeX can calculate prime numbers.” — DEK, interviewed in Peter Seibel's Coders at Work > Michael Plass, who was Don's student and worked with Don on TeX, told me once that "Don tried very hard not to make TeX a programming language. Unfortunately, he di
Based on important research like [this video] , it should definitely be possible to generate a .pptx that will run Windows inside of an emulator inside PowerPoint slides. That HTML file is lying to you!
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