Hacker News Reader

There are at least two excellent 32-byte x86 machine language Game of Life demos:

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85485

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=88201

The article expresses disappointment that a <40 character APL program mostly just demonstrates "why Game of Life is perfectly suited to solving in APL". But it seems harder to argue Game of Life is "perfectly suited" to solving with low-level x86 machine language.

View on HN

I think the point is rather in the opposite direction. He's not trying to argue that APL and the GOL problem are somehow uniquely matched. The idea is that yeah, APL makes a pretty solution, but it wouldn't be nearly as impressive if the parameters were changed. The point is that the APL solution people like to toss out is not flexible. Probably true of the 32b ASM demo too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com