A Mind Is Born (2017)
linusakesson.net
linusakesson.net
Download the 256 byte demo: https://hd0.linusakesson.net/files/a_mind_is_born.prg
Go to the emulator: https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&la...
Scroll down to "drop file", turn off autoload, upload the demo , turn on sound and fullscreen, then click the "load" button.
Personally I see this as a great work of art, perhaps in a way that some people consider great classical pieces of music. Here's a comment from the linked page that poetically reflects that sentiment:
This demo is not just technically impressive but I found also evocative of thought and emotion. This isn't just a programming triumph, but an artistic one.
The program itself, at 256 bytes, is little more than a "seed" from which the demo (and the Mind) blossoms from. It's so small that the actual execution in memory takes up more space, and watching it play out on YouTube takes up orders of magnitude more; how many dozens of gigabytes were transmitted by all the people who've watched videos of this demo?
But what about what we actually see and hear? The visuals start off as Sierpinski triangles, symbolic of both the endless, seemingly-chaotic nature of fractals as well as their order. As the song plays, the fractals become morphed into other shapes. Lines, sharp corners, and occasionally blobs show up, evoking in me images of wrinkles in brains or circuit patterns. The melody is randomly generated but backed by a simple, steady bass rhythm, a similar marriage of chaos and order. The song's climax (at 1:42 in the video) impresses upon me a march of progress as the Mind finally takes shape, formed from random matter and energy and into an entity. We observe the formation of the Mind from the ether not just visually and aurally, but also in the form of the 256-byte seed expanding into the demo flower, eventually taking shape as the C64's home screen.I always visit things like this because it keeps me humble. There are some giants roaming around doing stuff like this, quietly and humbly, but they're out there.
another nice example of why the Demoscene is a great example of digital culture/art and is being submitted to UNESCO in a number of countries to be on lists of world cultural heritage (successfully already in Finland, soon Germany I think)
Clever that he exploited artefacts of the DSP to create the drum sounds. That's kind of how old cheap CASIO keyboards work, by filtering glitches. Sweeping tight filter on you DSP is a trick modern electronic music uses to create a sense of variety in a repeating line. The melody generation is similar to how a Sample-and-hold waveforms create "melody" out of a random feed forward.
I remember when Nibble magazine used to have a 2-liner contest at the end of every issue for who go do the most with 2 lines of Applesoft Basic. Beagle Brothers even released a disk of 1-liners, which were really impressive.
This effect took decades to be explained in detail like he did.
He is not on GitHub/Twitch/itch (much), and self-hosts his blog. I think he likes it under the radar. I hope he's well compensated because he has the skills to become a super villain if need be.
His site is also full of interesting stuff, not just around C64.
Kind of astounding to think that the 720p50 video from YouTube is millions if not billions of times larger than the code that produced it and is still incredibly lossy.
(Re: compression, if we're being technical then the C64 machine instructions that the code calls would need to be included in the total. I think?)
It is an impressive display of how much video compression optimization is dependent on the fundamentals of the things we are recording/producing in the real world.
A Mind Is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 - March 2020 (1 comment)
There are a few other threads with 1 comment but not an interesting 1 comment.
A Mind Is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642527 - March 2020 (1 comment)
A Mind is Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907 - April 2017 (53 comments)
Previously from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063359 see also Ibniz, https://github.com/viznut/IBNIZ
also look up the byte-battles, the live head-to-head 256-byte programming tournamet
Why yes, hrumpf, of course, anyone would notice that! :-)
Respect. As an ex-Apple II programmer I love that old box. But wow the C64 has so many more tools to leverage for demos like this.
heh, I've been going in the opposite direction. No interrupts on the apple II?! gulp. I guess ppl added a MOS 6526 to their Apple IIes, but none exists in my IIc.
To me it almost feels as if God or whoever has intentionally hidden it, in the way everything works I mean, so that we could one day find it. Once we have invented complex numbers for example..
What other secrets are out there? Or rather in here?
I can even write it :)
x = 0
while (true):
eval(int_to_code(x))
x += 1
EDIT: I forgot about the stop problem. But that's easy - stop the eval when memory repeats.
x = 0
prevStates = None
while (true):
state = x
prevStates = set()
while(not state in prevStates):
prevStates += state
state = eval_1_step(int_to_code(state))
x += 1
What really blows my mind is that this basically makes the multiverse (everything that could happen - happens in some other universe).
This makes me wonder if, in the same way we've been technically-erroneously been hyperfocusing on CPU speed and quantity of memory in system-measuring contests and benchmarks, we've developed a fixation for how little RAM or CPU we can use while doing something interesting. I don't see the same sorts of fights developing around how much disk space we use or what the specs of all the systems we used for preprocessing are.
Demos are supposed to be about conquering limitations, right? Inspiring creativity and all that? Well, why can't we add those sorts of constraints in, then? Aren't we smart enough? :P
We might even build consciousness one day if we're honest about how much total resources we're using. That way we would actually have to reason about all the bits (no more "GPUs are really *that complicated* that what you're describing is impossible") and there would be no more black boxes.
Demos would be interesting.
My bet is on this being impossible to continue indefinitely due to the halting problem implying that it would fall into a loop eventually.
I wonder if this is possible at all without external input. I'm an ignorant in Complexity Theory though.
They are still very active and publish regularly.
here's some previous discussion:
that is based on Tezos and therefore relies on Proof-of-Stake instead of Proof-of-Work to reduce the environmental impacts.
Since you referenced the visuals, and the "How it Works" section details that they were secondary/dictated by the audio...what prompted you to focus on the visuals?
Just interested in your thoughts since presumably you read the technical details in the "How it Works" section.