tags:codehumanities
Abstractions, which are ubiquitous in computer science, hide nuance and detail in order to create concepts that are simpler to work with. There are dozens of layers of abstractions, beginning with the silicon, up through assembly language (the lowest level of abstraction available to programmers), and on to high-level programming languages and frameworks. These abstractions, of course, still affect the machine at the physical layer — the abstractions hide complexity, not remove it.
Firestarter
Firestarter is a processor stress test, essentially a program that makes the processor work as hard as possible in order to determine how the processor will behave under high load, for example, testing cooling systems at maximum power
Firestarter is designed to consume maximum power — and nothing else. As such it can reach both higher and more consistent levels of power consumption, thereby producing more reliable results. Firestarter’s code is a carefully constructed mass of assembly language instructions that work nearly all of the components of the processor simultaneously and as hard as possible — without calculating anything useful at all. Firestarter thus meets our definition of nonsense: its purpose is to change the state of the physical processor using the side effects of the available assembly language instructions.
decode 2
shl $1, esi;
shl $1, edi;
shr $1, edx;
The values in these three registers (edi, esi, and edx), are shifted to the left by one bit (shl), then shifted back to the right by one bit (shr), over and over again. At a semantic level, this repeated shuffling back-and-forth accomplishes nothing
Malbolge
Esoteric language - Malbolge was very difficult to understand when it arrived, taking two years for the first Malbolge program to appear. The author himself has never written a Malbolge program. The first program was not written by a human being; it was generated by a beam search algorithm implemented in Lisp.
NOTE
Beam Search - heuristic search algorithm that explores a graph by expanding the most promising node in a limited set.
Hello World
(=<`#9]~6ZY327Uv4-QsqpMn&+Ij"'E%e{Ab~w=_:]Kw%o44Uqp0/Q?xNvL:`H%c#DD2^WV>gY;dts76qKJImZkj
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