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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there will come a time when the HN audience will stop being amazed that some system is Turing complete, or that any Turing-complete system can run Doom (barring resource constraints). Maybe I’ve just seen it too often. The fact that TypeScript’s type system is Turing-complete was shown back in 2017 [0], and then of course you can run Doom on it.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14833

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There’s a difference between a _system_ being Turing complete and something actually _using_ that Turing-completeness to make something arbitrary run on it. You can’t deny this is an impressive effort.

It’s a considerable amount of work for sure, but that alone doesn’t make it impressive. Maybe there were particularly difficult hurdles to overcome that were solved in novel ways? But I don’t see such noteworthy aspects being mentioned in this thread, and it’s not evident at all that there should be any.

Oh come on, are you seriously being blasé about this? What could ever impress you?

A time-travel machine would be really impressive, I would give all my money for that, and even upvote the thread.

Is this your reaction when someone climbs a mountain? "Bipedal locomotion was shown sufficient for climbing mountains centuries ago, given reasonable assumptions about the terrain, why should I be impressed?"

Doing things can be difficult and admirable, even if it was confidently believed possible beforehand.

> Is this your reaction when someone climbs a mountain?

My reaction then isn’t “wow, this blows my mind that it’s possible”. The first time someone climbing Mount Everest 72 years ago was impressive and possibly astounding. Nowadays, not really that much.

It’s still impressive if your manager does it. Or your date. Or your mom.

> I wonder if there will come a time when the HN audience will stop being amazed that some system is Turing complete

The time is now, but if you had said

> I wonder if there will come a time when the HN audience will stop being amazed that some system can run Doom

The answer is never, and particularly not when its this insane to even try

We know that humans are capable of writing amazing symphonies or running a 2h marathon, so there’s no point in doing it?

Just because we know something is possible in theory doesn’t mean it’s not impressive to see it done in practice. There was a lot of effort and creativity involved here.

There is a big gap between "Turing complete"-able and "real-time, interactive, graphical and performant"-thing.

To be fair, this is graphical, but it's not real-time, not performant, and while it technically takes input, it'll be a while before you see it reflected in the output.

Ah yes, the Underpants Gnomes theory of Doom execution:

    1) Show that a system is Turing complete
    2) ???
    3) Run Doom on it.

Step 2 is, of course, always trivial, and no amount of effort or technical nous that goes into actually getting to step 3 can possibly be relevant.

I think you missed the part about how much effort they put into it.

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