An emulator for a single-instruction (NOR) CPU | Hacker News Reader

An emulator for a single-instruction (NOR) CPU

48 pointswlrm23 comments

The NOR Machine

The idea is to use just one function to compute everything. It suffices to do this for bits: bytes consist of bits, and if we can compute bits, we also can compute bytes, and everything made up of bytes. That is, everything.

There are sixteen boolean functions of two arguments. Two of them are special: NOR and NAND. The other fourteen functions can be computed using only either NOR or NAND. We’ll use NOR.

NOR’s truth table is as follows:

 	===== ========
 	Input  Output
 	===== ========
 	 A B  A NOR B
 	----- --------
 	 0 0     1
 	 0 1     0
 	 1 0     0
 	 1 1     0
 	===== ========

https://github.com/yuanxinyu/NOR-CPU

View on HN

This might be of your interest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

Also: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator (which makes x86 single-instruction)

Totally off topic, but i want more of his cantor dust!!!

How about computing with 0 instructions? (aka Intel MMU's fault handling is Turing complete): https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc

Also https://esolangs.org/wiki/OISC

One-instruction computers intrigue me because of the possibility of making the processor out of a ridiculously low number of transistors. To that effect, I've always wanted to implement one that doesn't require a hardware adder for the instruction pointer. It seems like it should be possible. For example, each clock cycle the CPU would take the NAND of the bit pointed to by the IP and the bit adjacent to it (via flipping the LSB of the IP) and use the result to determine a new value of the IP using very simple logic (E.g. IP = IP<<1 | NAND(mem[IP], mem[IP ^ 1]) ). But surprisingly, I've never seen this done and the last time I approached it I didn't have the knowledge needed to choose an appropriate scheme and prove its usability.

You might consider something like the IBM 650, where each instruction includes the address of the next instruction to execute.

A few processors, such as the TI TMS1000 and the Sharp SM4, used a maximal-length LFSR for the program counter. This may be more practical than it sounds, if your memory subsystem doesn't penalize out-of-order accesses. You could write code normally, pretending that instructions are at contiguous addresses, and then scramble the object code into LFSR sequence at link time.

As another note, for low gate count processors, you may want to look into bit-serial techniques, as used in the PDP-8/S.

"used a maximal-length LFSR for the program counter."

I found Wikipedia entry on MLS-LFSR. How do those end up useful in program counters?

"you may want to look into bit-serial techniques"

You talking about the 1-bit ALU's like these?

https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Comb/oneb...

Making a comeback in another field:

http://www.caesjournals.org/uploads/IJCAES-CSE-2012-132.pdf

You wouldn't normally use an LFSR as a program counter, because it's more convenient to have the instructions execute from address 1, 2, 3, 4, etc rather than (say) 79, 30, 61, 122, etc. But an LFSR has fewer gates than an adder, which is why it was used in those old 4-bit processors.

The last diagram in the page you linked shows three 1-bit ALUs chained together to make one 3-bit ALU. As I understand it, the PDP-8/S used a single 1-bit ALU to sequentially calculate each bit in a 12-bit output word, taking 12 cycles to emulate a 12-bit ALU. For the 3-bit example, imagine there being a single ALU which acts first as the rightmost ALU in the diagram, and then once you have the carryout bit it acts as the middle ALU, and finally it acts as the leftmost ALU.

Appreciate the tip.

> Two of them are special: NOR and NAND.

No, IMP does this as well. It has mostly been useful for memristor logic.

I have a suspicion there is a more general mathematical law that says any boolean rule with a 1-of-4 split (either exactly one true or exactly one false) can be used for general computation, if you can make a NOT gate out of it. (Since AND/OR obviously is not workable.) So there should be six possible universal logic gates.

The rule relies inductively on proving a nand (or nor or any one of them in the class) is a universal computer, then any other gate where you can hardwire an input to construct an inverter can be treated as that universal gate with some combination of the previously mentioned inverters slapped on inputs and/or output. I don't remember the details either, LOL, but that was the general gist of it, if you can make inverters out of an alternative then you can slap enough inverters on it to make a NAND eventually.

IMP alone is not enough to construct a gate that always outputs 0.

(Not A) or B, to save others the search.

IMP is really NOT( A AND NOT ( B ) )

A → B |- ~(A & ~B)

1) A → B [by assumption] 1

2) A & ~B [by assumption] 2

3) A [conj. elim. 2] 2

4) B [imp by 1,2] 1,2

5) ~B [conj. elim 2] 2

6) B & ~B [conj 4,5] 1,2

7) ~(A & ~B) [reductio ad absurdum 2,6] 1

{Thus by assuming only A → B we prove that we can derive ~(A & ~B).}

From there you can also trivially prove that ~(A & ~B) |- A → B; thus, they are tautologous and so given the primitives ~ and &, implication is not quite as "special" for a Universal Turing machine. This is merely to show, independent of any construction using only IMP, one can trivially reduce it to more primitive components, thus undermining any claim to a "special" status in the context of universal computation.

Rather than deducing it, you can also look at the truth table, see it is 0 exactly where B is not true and A is true, and get not(A and not B). Then, we can conclude there is a proof such as yours from the completeness theorem, I believe.

Yes, but it's more fun and edifying to prove it. :) It's so rare I get an opportunity to whip out propositional logic and formal proof methods that I hardly balk at the opportunity. (hears groans from non-nerds)

If you use DeMorgan's law on your result, you can simplify it further to ~A | B

Not exactly the same thing, but the Apollo Guidance Computer is built entirely out of 3-input NOR gates:

http://klabs.org/history/ech/agc_schematics/

Neat CPU. That and adamnemecek's comment made me do a quick Google to see if there's interesting results in OISC that you all might enjoy. Found an improvement on SUBLEQ that's pretty impressive. Original first and newest below:

http://hasith.vidanamadura.net/projects/subleq/

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.2593v1.pdf

"Our test results demonstrate that computational power of our Subleq OISC multi-processor is comparable to that of CPU of a modern personal computer."

I didn't see that coming for OISC projects. Pleasant surprise. :)

You might enjoy the Matrix Logic series of books by August Stern, which develop the idea of logic operations as vector multiplication. The NOR operator would be represented by a 2x2 matrix, [10|00], and an operation such as 1 NOR 0 would be the matrix multiplication [01]x[10|00]x[10]^T. (Scalar operand 1 is represented by [01], and 0 by [10], in both left and right hand forms.) It's simple but deep, when fully extended. Treated as linear algebra, logic is a lot more sensible. There are surprises, too. For instance, a statement like [01]x[01|11]x[01|11]x[10] makes perfect sense: 1 OR OR 0. So what is OR OR? Is it useful? This wouldn't be obvious from the usual way of computing OR as addition mod 2, and the messiness of carrying the extra digit in 1 OR 1. Determining the truth value of statements by direct computation, without reference to an external truth table, gives mathematical certainty to the outcome. Multiple statements can be compounded with tensors, giving operators that are 2^n in dimension. Complementarity plays a huge role in showing coherence of the matrix system of logic. There's much more, but that's the general idea. I was reminded of Matrix Logic, because Stern shows a computation done strictly with NAND, plus NOT, to illustrate how many operations must be done, where using different operators would have been much more efficient.

Reminds me of a book and Coursera course called "From NAND to Tetris" by Noam Nissan and Shimon Shocken. You can learn how to build a computer from basic logic gates, the web site below provides a hardware simulator in JAVA and pre-made components.

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com