Something Something Programming There is a well-known Christmas carol that starts out like this: God rest you merry gentlemen Let nothing you dismay Remember Christ our saviour Was born on Christmas Day Another carol has this verse: The holly bears a prickle As … Read more
The classic Busy Beaver game asks how long an n-state k-color Turing machine program can run before executing a halt instruction. The phrase “executing a halt instruction” is not normally used in stating the problem; instead, people just say “halting”. … Read more
The Spaghetti Code Conjecture says that Busy Beaver programs ought to be, in some sense, as complicated as possible. Scott Aaronson puts it this way: Busy Beavers shouldn’t be “cleanly factorizable” into main routines and subroutines—but rather, the way to … Read more
“signed char lotte” is a computer program written by Brian Westley and the winner of the “Best Layout” award in the 1990 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The cleverness of the text is staggering. Superficially it reads as an epistolary … Read more