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

I remember finding the original terminfo Turing completeness article, which was published in 2019, amazing.

In the era of LLMs articles such as these do nothing for me any more.

This article is mostly, if not entirely, LLM-generated. It’s done in a slightly less blatant way than most, but the tells are there, and pangram agrees.

But even if the article was human-written, I’d still not find it impressive now. There’s no way of telling a human was behind the discovery.

Does it play Doom yet??

Terminfo was never a particularly good idea, but in today's day and age it has become simply ridiculous. Its original purpose was to store data about actually manufactured physical terminals, and so it was okay that it was a fixed DB (as opposed to interactively querying the terminal for its capabilities somehow).

These days though, terminals are all software. It would be very easy to just ask them. Instead we still insist on shipping a fixed terminfo or termcaps DB. As a consequence, every new terminal emulator is not in there, and so in order to give their users a tolerable experience, they all lie and say they're xterm-256color. Which completely removes any incentive to actually add them to terminfo/termcaps.

So we have this hellishly complex, nearly Turing complete compatibility system that does no useful work at all anymore.