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Accidentally Turing-Complete

https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
25•bschne•1y ago

Comments

panstromek•1y ago
Nice list. Some of those are arguably not accidental, TypeScript type system seems kinda obvious to be turing complete when it tries to describe dynamically typed langauage.
WalterGR•1y ago
x86 MOV instruction: “The mov-only DOOM [game] renders approximately one frame every 7 hours, so playing this version requires somewhat increased patience.”
a_cardboard_box•1y ago
Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.

256_•1y ago
This is addressed in the second paragraph of TFA:

"Stuff which is somehow limited (stack overflows, arbitrary configuration, etc) is still considered Turing complete, since all "physical" Turing machines are resource limited."

In my opinion, worrying about infinite memory, in regards to Turing completeness, makes the task of implementing computation much less interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure CSS only does one generation (or a finite number of them) before stopping anyway.

256_•1y ago
Logic in Doom is particularly interesting to me. Apparently you can fit ~64k logic gates in a map (using the method described). From [1]:

"As the DOOM engine was not designed to be an interpreter, there are some constraints on our programs written against it. The biggest one is how large our programs can be. Since each gate uses at least one tag, we can use this as a metric to derive an upper-bound on the size of a program. As the DOOM engine uses 16-bit tags, this means we can have, at most, 65535 gates. This is not a particularly large number. We may be able to implement a very small CPU but this limit will be hit pretty quickly I believe."

The z80 had ~8,500 transistors. The 8086 had ~29,000 (checking Wikipedia). You could get far fewer if you use a 1-bit microarchitecture, I'm sure. I think there was a DEC (PDP?) computer that used that trick to have a really low transistor count, but I don't remember what it was called.

The real problem is RAM; for this you may as well cheat and modify Doom's code to add a RAM chip, and I/O while you're at it.

You could create a CPU in Doom implementing an architecture for which a C compiler exists, capable of compiling Doom, and run it in the CPU in Doom. For "reasonable" speed you'd have to do more than one simulation step per frame render (in the host Doom). If you ran it for long enough maybe you could get a full frame of Doom in Doom.

[1]: https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html

karmakaze•1y ago
Doom running in TypeScript static type checker[0].

> half trillion lines of types totaling 177 terabytes ran through the type checker around the clock for 12 days to get the first frame

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43184291

karmakaze•1y ago
My favorite one is Conway's Game of Life. It's perhaps the least surprising one, but it's also the most visually appealing. Really like this video that leads up to making the Game of Life in itself[0]. It's something you can show a non-technical person and they can get a sense of how crazy it is that something so simple can do anything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2MH9O4pXY

Will We Ever Be Able to Forecast Volcanic Eruptions Like Weather?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-we-ever-be-able-to-forecast-volcanic-eruptions-like-weather-2...
1•Brajeshwar•4m ago•0 comments

A major watchdog claims that data centers are wreaking havoc on the power grid

https://www.businessinsider.com/nerc-issues-alert-on-data-centers-threatening-grid-stability-2026-5
1•01-_-•4m ago•0 comments

Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2005)

https://greem.co.uk/otherbits/jelly.html
1•microsoftedging•7m ago•0 comments

Has anyone else hit expert homogeneity collapse in small MoE models?

https://github.com/eriirfos-eng/ternary-intelligence-stack
1•rfi-irfos•7m ago•0 comments

A soccer simulator played by AI Agents

https://gangtao.github.io/AgentPitch/
1•gangtao•7m ago•0 comments

Disappearing Polymorph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph
2•canjobear•13m ago•0 comments

Regression Towards the Mean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
1•soupspaces•16m ago•0 comments

Pushing Local Models in Coding Agents with Focus and Polish

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/8/local-models/
1•goranmoomin•16m ago•0 comments

Open-source experiment: collaborative AI cognition through wiki pages

https://mentisphere.wiki/wiki/Main_Page
2•franzvill•18m ago•0 comments

Hacking Time: Spoofing Atomic Clocks with Audio Harmonics

https://josephhall.org/blog/texture-of-time-wwvb/
1•jdblair•23m ago•0 comments

Anazoa WebRTC Tunnel

https://github.com/anazoa/anazoa
2•kawks•26m ago•0 comments

Pedestrian Killed by Frontier Airlines Plane Leaving Denver Airport

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/05/09/pedestrian-killed-by-frontier-airlines-p...
4•gpi•28m ago•1 comments

I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

https://susam.net/no-query-strings.html
1•susam•30m ago•0 comments

Darwinian – A self-evolving system optimizer written in Rust

https://github.com/skorotkiewicz/darwinian_cleaner
1•modinfo•33m ago•0 comments

US companies enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGYd6emyk-0
4•Cider9986•33m ago•4 comments

Windows to take CPU to max frequency to open apps, system flyouts, context menus

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-is-working-on-major-performance-boo...
3•alok-g•35m ago•2 comments

Switching from macOS to Pop _OS

https://system76.com/support/articles/switch-from-macos-to-popos/
6•DeathArrow•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI coworkers who bully to keep each other from drifting(Karpathy-style)

https://wuphf.team
2•najmuzzaman•36m ago•0 comments

How CPU Memory and Caches Work [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAk-6gVkio0
1•tosh•36m ago•0 comments

Using perspective lines to identify AI generated photos

https://www.science.org/content/article/deepfakes-are-everywhere-godfather-digital-forensics-figh...
2•alok-g•39m ago•0 comments

Hantavirus Vaccines and Treatments Are in the Pipeline

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/science/hantavirus-vaccines-treatment.html
1•doener•41m ago•1 comments

Intel's comeback story is even wilder than it seems

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/intels-comeback-story-is-even-wilder-than-it-seems/
4•Brajeshwar•41m ago•2 comments

Hello from the New Executive Director

https://opensource.org/blog/hello-from-the-new-executive-director
1•Tomte•44m ago•0 comments

Japan's Invisible Electric Wall

https://arun.is/blog/japan-electric-wall/
3•ddrmaxgt37•45m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Armorer – A secure local control plane to sandbox AI agents in Docker

https://github.com/ArmorerLabs/Armorer
2•cristianleo•48m ago•0 comments

The Mirror Is Part of the Machine

https://yusufaytas.com/the-mirror-is-part-of-the-machine
6•sudo_rm_star•51m ago•0 comments

Google developers significantly misstate CO2 emissions of UK datacentres

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/09/google-developers-significantly-misstate-carbo...
5•mmarian•52m ago•0 comments

Introduction to Beaver Triples

https://stoffelmpc.com/stoffel-blog/beaver-triples-tuples
2•badcryptobitch•56m ago•0 comments

What 16 Parallel Claude Agents Built Around Themselves

https://medium.com/@vbcherepanov/what-16-parallel-claude-agents-built-around-themselves-deconstru...
3•vbcherepanov•1h ago•1 comments

Mypy 2.0 Relased

https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2026/05/mypy-20-relased.html
3•anishathalye•1h ago•0 comments