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Comment by daniel-thompson | Hacker News Reader

I would like to know what techniques the author used to build the interpreter. Was it done by hand? Was it semi-automated?

The reason I ask is, the Wikipedia article mentions the extreme difficulty of writing even a simple Hello World program (to the point where a brute-force automated search was required to "find" one).. a working Lisp interpreter seems to me to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than that.

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I believe writing Malbolge programs became easier (in a very relative sense) once Lou Scheffer published his cryptanalysis (!) of the language (specifically, the instruction encryption scheme) in 2004. [1][2]

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Malbolge_programming

[2] http://www.lscheffer.com/malbolge.shtml

Lou Scheffer's cryptanalysis is still fairly shallow. It seems like Lou themselves weren't too sure about Malbolge's capabilities (see below); their website remains mostly theoretical the entire time.

> The day that someone writes, in Malbolge, a program that simply copies its input to it's output, is the day my hair spontaneously turns green. It's the day that elephants are purple and camels fly, and a cow can fit through a needle's eye.

Given the amount of time people spent trying to implement something interesting in Malbolge (unshackled), I would also be very interested in a detailed explanation, perhaps a blog post, of how you achieved this.

Otherwise I am inclined to believe that this must be the result of exploiting a loophole, perhaps the interpreter not implementing the malbolge specification or something.

You're free to run this with alternative Malbolge Unshackled interpreters to verify it (although you'd probably be better off using an optimised one, that fixes to some rotation width - otherwise the code will be orders of magnitude slower).

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