Quine Relay | Hacker News Reader

Quine Relay

github.com

983 pointscodeulike177 comments

I know we shouldn't care about the source, crazy-insane as he obviously is, but FWIW, the author is Yusuke Endoh, one of the Ruby core members. RubySource had an interview with him here:

http://rubysource.com/meet-fifteen-ruby-core-committers/

He lists his "hobby in programming" as: "writing a Quine and enjoying esoteric programming."

Indeed, the Japanese ruby community has quite a few interesting characters like this.. In fact, someone even wrote a book about using ruby as a base for creating esoteric languages! http://www.amazon.co.jp/Ruby%E3%81%A7%E4%BD%9C%E3%82%8B%E5%A...

I really wish there was a translation of this.

see also his "music box quine"

https://github.com/tric/trick2013/blob/master/mame1/entry.rb

from TRICK2013 (The 1st Transcendental Ruby Imbroglio Contest for rubyKaigi)

https://sites.google.com/site/trickcontest2013/

This is truly baffling! I had to run it on my machine, and it really works as advertised. For the curious who can't (or don't want to) install the compilers for all those languages, here's a zip file with all the intermediate files generated https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2683925/bigquine.zip

I feel awful for pointing this out, but the author spelled Copyright incorrectly in the last line.

Fortunately, he can correct it without blowing out his Ascii art by deleting the extra space between '##' and 'Quine'.

I'd issue a pull request myself, but it'd be like me putting soy sauce on a piece of Jiro Ono's sushi. I am completely unworthy.

Wouldn't you also need to fix src/QR.rb.gen.rb?

Yeah. Like I said, not worthy :)

I've started looking through it. It's very clever, most of it beyond my ken, but even the technique with the image template of '#'s is a treat when you start to see how it works.

I feel like the fact that you took the time to figure out how to fix it makes you at least somewhat worthy.

When I first spotted that, I wasn't sure if it was intentional. Maybe the comments are a part of the input.

But then the cycle would probably not close anymore - the end result would not be the initial code.

He's fixed it now!

Fixed:

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/commit/b9322a12e9598911f...

The hashes are automatically generated, it turns out.

Fascinating. Even the README generator is on another level of meta: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/README.m...

And: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

This project isn't code, it's art.

Edit:

Heh, Brainfuck, Whitespace, Logo... and notice they're all in alphabetical order?

Brainfuck is fairly practical compared to Unlambda and INTERCAL.

I have to admit that I was a little let down to see that APL was not included. Not in the same class as those languages... technically.

Or J to keep things ascii. Though I would have loved to have seen Malbolge. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge) It's already super impressive, but with some extra work it could be hyper impressive!

Perhaps my favorite paragraph on all of wikipedia:

INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.

COME FROM also allows elegant aspect-oriented programming :)

> COME FROM also allows elegant aspect-oriented programming :)

I used to make fun of Intercal, until I had to do with a Simulink model that made use of FROM blocks.

It's just as retarded as you'd expect. It's as if someone intentionally decided to take a step back from structured programming, and then some more steps back.

Sounds like a listener to me.

Not quite, a listener isn't supposed to steal your thread of control indefinitely...

And there are interpreter implementations for both Whitespace and Unlambda.

There's even a Rake task to generate a Makefile that runs all the 50 multiquines and uses the dependency tracking of make to determine the order of execution instead of running the 50 commands one after the other in the same rule.

It's like everything in this project is incredibly elegant and self-referential.

If anyone wants to give this a go. I have created a Vagrant config which installs the OS, tools and runs the chain of programs. You can find it here: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/vagrant-quine-relay

I installed it yesterday. It fails at the point of Jasmin:

jasmin QR.j QR.j:2: Warning - Syntax error.

^ QR.j:2: Error - Couldn't repair and continue parse.

^ QR.j: Found 2 errors

And then completely craps out at the badly generated Java. Any idea of what goes?

I successfully compiled every intermediary, and posted all of the code in a gzipped tarball here: http://goo.gl/EBZFV.

I started a tiny stub post here, where I'd like to dig into the code over the next couple of days: http://vedantmisra.com/2013/07/yusuke-endohs-amazing-quine-r...

I also made an EC2 AMI, ID ami-744b351d, for anyone who would like to try this themselves.

The code that generates the quine is included. There's still lots of super impressive stuff here, but don't be intimidated thinking he wrote that monster by hand!

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/code-gen...

LOL! The codegen for Java is so much longer than any of the others!

Anyone care to explain how it works? I can see how the first step "Ruby -> X" is done, but what about "X -> Y"?

If anything, that makes it even more impressive.

Fantastic!

Same fellow who did the "rotating globe" quine a few years back:

http://mamememo.blogspot.ca/2010/09/qlobe.html

i found that to be even more amazing! ;D

I wrote a post about how to do these multi-lingual quines a while back: https://nolancaudill.com/2011/01/01/how-to-build-a-quine/

Wow, even the source code of the original file is arranged to look like the Star of David surrounded by the dragon-eel thing, Obfuscated-C-contest style:

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

The dragon-eel thing is an Ouroboros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

My thoughts went from "This is amazing" to "But he must have taken a lot of time and brainpower to do this" to "This is useless really" to "So what? If I wanted to do that I would take a year perhaps if I ever could" to "This is amazing"

As if in line with some sort of sick and twisted version of the Kübler-Ross model

That is both the most incredible thing I've ever seen, yet also by far the saddest thing I've ever seen. Props to the author for taking dedication to a whole new level.

Link to a description of what this actually is: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

I'm sorry, how is that sad?

Indeed. That's a transmutation circle of awesome.

I think he's referring to the relative uselessness of the code. Yes it would have taken a lot of time, talent and intellect to produce but from what I understand is of relatively little use?

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

There has been a spat of comments criticizing stories along the lines of "what use does it have?" As pointed out previously on all of them, and at the risk of sounding redundant, this is "Hacker News", not "Only Useful Things News" or even "Mildly Interesting News".

Looking at the front page of HN, I think it's pretty safe to say it's moved a fair distance from news of only VCs, startups and such to the realm of what we find interesting. This is interesting. It's not useful, particularly well built or even presentable at a sales meeting. But it is interesting.

you've just described art.

Came to say this, but I could not say it with the brevity you did.

What function is the Mona Lisa accomplishing behind layers of glass, with security guards posted 'round the clock, in a museum in France?

That's the entire point of a quine.

This dude's State Alchemist title is probably Fullcode Alchemist

possibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?

Which is a silly notion. Everyone needs entertainment and to have fun. Some people do it in different ways than others.

The first two are already curable (with food).

Do you feel the same way when someone bakes a cake, takes a walk, watches a sporting event, knits a sweater, or writes a poem?

I think that people view art as a side effect of abundance. It is something that naturally arises given a surplus of some thing.

The point of contention here is that someone of that level of intellect has "wasted" their talent on art, rather than productivity, which "should" come first.

For varying definitions of "should" and "wasted", of course.

The effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.

You have no idea how long it took to write this program. I bet it's less than the amount of time a typical baseball fan spends watching games over the course of a season.

P.S. Knitting a sweater takes forever too. Especially if it has buttons.

Man, fuck buttons.

Comment of the year :)

It depends on the quality of cake you are eating. There's a massive difference between a chocolate birthday cake for a 4 yr old or Profiteroles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiterole

Who cares about whether a person should build an Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks or go try to solve cancer? Pushing humanity forward is great - and so is finding personal happiness and growth through exploration. Don't knock one or the other; in fact, don't knock any at all. Both are ways to ascribe meaning to this meaningless place.

The sort of attitude he is demonstrating is backed by some sort of perverse notion that "smart" people somehow owe so much more to society than the rest of humanity that they should not have hobbies because that would delay them paying back their debt.

I don't know what could cause somebody to adopt such a twisted notion, but I think the roots of it go deeper than I care to know.

I also know plenty of people who waste their intellect painting canvases, when they could be advancing the species by doing something practical. Shall we shed a tear for their wasted efforts as well? But of course not. Art is its own justification.

And this program, my friends? This is art.

Art that only exists for the sake of existing, without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind - art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make it any less wasteful use of human time and attention. Personally, I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved.

> without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind

I hope you're just being sarcastic.

"I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved."

Nor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine. I respect it because it stimulates my mind. My imagination is moved by it in much the same way that it's moved by holding an acorn in my hand while contemplating a fully grown oak tree. Or studying the math that causes z <- z^2 + C to describe a ridiculously intricate shape. Or implementing my own minimal Lisp interpreter from scratch. Or trying to understand the Banach-Tarski paradox. These things stimulate my sense of wonder because they're like a magic trick, but there's no trickery involved. And when I contemplate them, I learn more about the world. Art cannot aspire to much more than that.

Nor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine.

Yet people gladly upvote stories about computers implemented insite Minecraft and life-size spaceships made out of Lego blocks. Are you saying it has nothing to do with the difficulty involved? I doubt this story would be equally well received if there was some easy way to achieve the same result. If you take difficulty of the task out of the equation, what will be left? How much of what's left is genuine creativity and skill, and how much is mere patience?

"Are you saying it has nothing to do with the difficulty involved?"

No, of course not. The "simply" was what I was disagreeing with.

That's a pretty caustic take on an inherently subjective matter: the appreciation of beauty.

Also, in what way is this exercise not exploratory?

What does it explore?

The very nature of self-expression.

(If you are looking for other people to explain to you how to appreciate art, you are going to have a bad time.)

I'm am tired of these elitist views of art. You sir, know nothing of art.

http://www.lynetteabel.org/L-ABEL-Seminar-Appreciate.htm

   Eli Siegel explains in his great essay "The Serious Aspect of Snobbery":  
    Snobbery is the unwillingness to like something, unless at the same time it 
    makes one feel more important;...
    [It] is the inability or lack of desire to appreciate justly.

You using a quote of a quote to launch a personal attack, while explicitly doing the thing that you're accusing me of. That is, you assume that the motivation behind my comment is to feel superior to certain other people by excluding some things from the realm of "good art". Yet your comment explicitly divides people into "snobs" and "not snobs", makes a fairly obvious statement about superiority of one group and hints at the fact that you belong to the other group.

  >...art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people 
  who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make 
  it any less wasteful use of human time and attention.

...is your opinion. Opinion that as downvoters have noted, is full of snobbery. Not even mildly vindicated snobbery that's tolerated on this forum like picking your religion (I.E. favorite IDE, programming language etc...) which someone could assert with reasonable confidence with anecdotes of personal experience at least; it was wholly devoid of intellectual merit... and was snobbery.

That's not a personal attack. I don't know you personally and nor was it an attack. I felt it was merely an observation. But If you took an observation as an attack, then doesn't that speak to the validity of the quote?

I don't appreciate a whole swath of what is considered "modern art" either (though I do like Dada, if anything for it's quirkiness that I find interesting). But never have I called someone else's creation of time and effort "garbage" purely due to my lack of appreciation.

it was wholly devoid of intellectual merit...

I think the notion that purpose and intent behind art is far more important than the amount of effort involved in its creation has considerable amount of intellectual merit. Even more so considering how unpopular it is. Whether people choose to read the whole comment, or prefer to see "bla, bla, bla, garbage!" is a different matter.

  >Whether people choose to read the whole comment, or prefer to see "bla, bla, bla, garbage!" is a different matter.

Interesting that you assume we didn't read the rest of the comment. I assure you most of us do prefer to take things in context. It's OK to look up once instead of looking down all the time.

Purpose is ancillary to art. Art without purpose and merely is as art has been a cornerstone of creative expression since art has existed. The fact that you prefer to inject purpose behind it now has no bearing whatsoever on what people will consider artistic. You're not the arbiter of worth or taste.

Unlike the others, I completely agree. Art that does not "express, explore, or otherwise stimulate the human mind"[1] is the definition of boring.

I would however claim that the vast majority of art does stimulate the mind, though it may not stimulate yours without some additional effort. Indeed just about anything in the world is capable of stimulating your mind if you look closely enough at it, to paraphrase John Cage.

[1] ... or, if we take a 'vibrant matter' / 'object oriented ontology' view of the world, stimulate something.

John Cage? You were quoting Gustave Flaubert:

> Pour qu’une chose soit intéressante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps.

http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/conard/outils/1...

No, I wasn't quoting anybody, I was paraphrasing John Cage. Here is the quote:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” ― John Cage

On the contrary, to the extent something intends to "express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind," it isn't art - it's rhetoric, or science, or entertainment. Obviously lots of works of art were created for some end (renaissance paintings functioned as religious and political propaganda; Shakespeare's plays are entertaining), but they are art to the extent that they step back from that end, and display what Kant calls "purposiveness without particular purpose."

Still, I reserve the right to be a lot more impressed with this than a painting of a bunch of cans of Campbell's soup.

Smart people are too burdened with the responsibility to save the world to spend on leisure.

We don't owe you shit, it was like this when we got here.

This criticism could also be applied to, say, the entirety of pure mathematics.

What is sad is that the author probably has no plan to explain how it was accomplished, which prevents anyone from learning from this.

The author has explained it, here: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20130715/p1

In the "spoiler" section:

""" Normally quines are made like this:

   s = (something that generates your own source code)

   puts s

At the same time, a Ruby program that outputs a Perl program looks like this:

   puts "print(\"...\");"

If you combine these with quine methods, you get a multi-quine that goes between Ruby and Perl:

   s = (something that generates your own source code)

   puts "print(\"#{ s }\");"

Theoretically you just repeat this process. Except, there are the following practical problems:

   - Need proper escaping

      + Lots of old languages do not support C style of escape sequences.

      + Depending on languages, you need to escape interpolations.

   - Cobol and Fortran programs have troublesome constraints

      + Need 7 spaces on the left and less than 80 columns per line, etc.

   - Naive escaping will cause intermediate files to get too large.

      + JVM Strings have 64K size limit.

      + Languages like Intercal and Whitespace will become unbearably slow.

In order to avoid these, Perl requires something like ppencode, Java needs LZW compression to avoid string size limits. Cobol's line length limit was satisfied using Closure generator, Fortran's line length limit was satisfied using Coffeescript generator. People who are interested should see the generated code. """

In general, there isn't any standard method to making quines. You just keep on tweaking the code until the input and output matches, mostly by trial and error.

I don't think people want to spend all their time trying to fight cancer or heart disease. Once in a while, you really need to get your mind to work on entirely useless things. IMO, that sort of mental workout makes people tackle the real hard problems better.

If I make a ranked list of all the ways that people spend their time, I cannot imagine a sensible scoring algorithm that puts making a quine relay lower in value than posting an internet comment bitching about somebody making a quine relay.

+1, imagining the scoring algorithm you mention would even rank higher than the posting of that comment!

Very funny. I think it might be possible to come up with a sensible algorithm that yields such a result. If so, it would definitely have $time_spent in a denominator somewhere :)

[edited to improve wording]

bitching about someone making a quine relay takes like 10 seconds, though.

That's because there's only ten seconds' worth of intelligence going into the bitching.

A truly worthwhile bitching would take at least an hour.

So are you saying that if he had not spent his time doing this, he would have cured cancer? You're forgetting the amount of people this will inspire to go on and create amazing software.

This wasn't made by a doctor or a biochemist.

So the guy who did this must spend his time solving the problems people cause for themselves by eating too much, exercising too little? And smoking?

I don't think so.

Its not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine generation[1], and the authors have a very popular talk where they livecode a quine generator; that is, they livecode a program that generates an infinite list of quines[2] (source code from talk [3]).

[1] http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-... [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren [3] https://github.com/webyrd/quines

The talk is amazing and hilarious.

On point, if the code is not generated in this fashion, there is assuredly a "work smart not hard" trick that drastically simplifies the problem.

> This code was probably generated.

The code generator is included in the repo: src/code-gen.rb

art

Saying that hacking is "sad" is arrogantly elevating your own limited worldview over the worldview of hackers. Perhaps someday you could hope to become as awesome as the person you're criticizing, but first you have to realize that being a hacker is something worth aspiring to.

If you think that anything about this is sad, then you simple don't love programming enough.

There's nothing wrong with not loving programming, but calling people who clearly do "sad" because of it, is a bit, well, sad.

I feel like everybody is taking this comment the wrong way. It sounds like a compliment followed by a joke.

This is a relatively common form of humor. A great achievement followed by a realization of the cost of that achievement.

"I just won my 1000th game of <insert video game>! ...I should go outside."

In case someone is able to run this beast, I'd appreciate an upload of the intermediate source files.

Yeah, I want to see the golang code.

Here's the generated QR.go https://gist.github.com/SikhNerd/6004502

Thank you.

Here it is on Go playground. It can be gofmt'ed there. http://play.golang.org/p/p4TS3CAYuh

I gave it a (very) quick go, but failed and I don't have neither the time nor skill to debug it, I'll throw up what got generated so far if you're interested. https://twitter.com/sikhnerd/status/356920512770867200

I'm grabbing the packages (in Ubuntu 12.04, just sub "clojure1.4" with "clojure" and you should be able to grab them all)... will attempt to run it once I get this all set up.

here's my efforts so far on OS X Lion: https://gist.github.com/dwo/6004592

I made it to the first Fortran, 24 out of 50:

    gfortran -o QR QR.f && ./QR > QR.f90
    gfortran: internal compiler error: Killed (program f951)

Giving up now.

Aren't ICE errors fun?! You're lucky if you get a pass name and stack trace. Sheesh!

Working on it now. I started a repo where I document the things I had to do to get it to work, i.e. where I had to do something other than what was in Mame's README:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles

The intermediate source files I've been able to generate so far are in /output_files:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles/tree/master/output...

Edit: Direct link to the go file:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles/blob/master/output...

Edit2: I ended up copying so much of what was already there that I re-did this as a fork, adding my contributions in two directories (installation and intermediate):

https://github.com/SilasX/quine-relay

So far I'm stuck at an issue with the Pascal compiler not accepting long strings, which can be fixed either with a compiler switch or by editing the source earlier in the relay.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/issues/3

Woot! Pascal issue fixed in a later commit:

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/commit/5d8c1e61a5012b9b5...

(Replying to self because I can't further edit that comment.)

I successfully compiled every intermediary, and posted all of the code in a gzipped tarball here: http://goo.gl/EBZFV.

I also made an EC2 AMI, ID ami-744b351d, for anyone who would like to try this themselves.

I started a tiny stub post here, where I'd like to dig into the code over the next couple of days: http://vedantmisra.com/2013/07/yusuke-endohs-amazing-quine-r...

I posted about it earlier in a reply here to OP.

Great work! I wasn't able to get past the QR.pas file. On both yours and mine I get the error:

    QR.pas(1,32) Error: Constant strings can't be longer than 255 chars

The miracle happens here: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/code-gen...

Also the SVG to ASCII mapping is cool!

Yeah this is crazy. Just a taste, this is "Hello, world!" in Intercal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Hello.2C_world

This should be in MOMA.

Why's there a Star of David in the middle?

a) The author is Jewish

b) It's semantically relevant

(Probably the latter. Same goes for the typo in the copyright notice in the end.)

Both semantically and semitically relevant, in other words.

I did consider a) but I'm pretty sure "Yusuke Endoh" is not Jewish.

He's Japanese, and one of the authors of the Ruby programming language

Being Japanese doesn't actually preclude you from being Jewish. It makes it highly unlikely... but not impossible.

True.. but you're more likely to find a Japanese Mormon than a Japanese Jew.

It's actually a transmutation circle symbol from the manga/anime Fullmetal Alchemist

Actually, the Ouroboros Tattoo on the villians Lust / Gluttony / Greed / etc. etc. from Full Metal Alchemist, of whom were created using the human transmutation circle (getting into the details of which would be spoilers...).

Ex: Wrath's tattoo is in his eye:

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130406001619/fma/ima...

Why do people always ask this? Last time it was in the Visual Website Optimizer thread.

Why people shouldn't ask? Especially when it is not obvious how something is relevant.

The symbol of note is not "The Star of David", but instead Ouroboros, the eternal snake... symbolized by a snake eating his own tail.

I believe he chose the symbol Ouroboros to represent the "immortality through change" of the code. In one story... Ouroboros was an immortal snake who constantly shed his skin, and took on many forms.

Similarly, this code constantly changes form, yet is immortal. While it changes form, it manages to keep its identity.

The Star of David is incidental. As far as I know... it was added to the Ouroboros symbol in the anime/manga Full Metal Alchemist, but that rendition is perhaps the most famous artistic rendition of Ouroboros in recent culture.

Ouroboros had some connotations in the classical psudo-science of Alchemy as well. So perhaps there is an earlier version of Ouroboros + Star of David.

> The Star of David is incidental. As far as I know... it was added to the Ouroboros symbol in the anime/manga Full Metal Alchemist, but that rendition is perhaps the most famous artistic rendition of Ouroboros in recent culture.

Wheel of Time series begs to differ.

The Great Serpent Ring does seem to be Ouroboros indeed... but it does not have the Star of David on it. :-p

The author, Yusuke Endoh, is Japanese though, so it stands to reason that he might be more exposed to a Japanese representation.

The "Star of David", like many Jewish symbols, has long been associated with alchemy and magic arts (and other less savoury enterprises) in classic European cultures. See for example [1] from a basic google search. This is likely why it was used in the anime, probably just to avoid the usual boring pentagram.

[1] http://www.truthperfected.com/2012/12/seal-of-solomon.html

Which means it gets shown in anime for pure Rule of Cool reasons, and then Japanese people have not the slightest idea that it's actually the flag-symbol of Jews.

It's not like I would know the standard symbol for Shintoism unless I googled it.

I think it's much simpler than that: Ruby code goes through all those languages, just to generate itself again, hence completing the cycle.

A fan of Chinese Checkers?

Here's another one of his projects where you can write ruby script using just underscores. https://github.com/mame/_

Day 5462 on the internet.

Today, I have seen true madness.

NB: I originally posted this with the link pointing to the QR.rb file, which is the main code file and also a piece of Ascii art. Looks like the mods switched the link back to the main project to provide more context. But to have people looking at QR.rb first and then reading about what it does afterwards was the idea. Amazing piece of work by @hirekoke.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

This reminds me very much of the various types of mathematical exercises that seem to be very esoteric and academic but turned out to be very useful in some solution in physics (eg. lorentz contractions). I would not be surprised if some insight indirectly comes from this insanely amazing exercise.

It terrifies me what this insight might be.

The best part is that the cycle is in alphabetical order.

Molecular biology?

If computer languages were evolving organisms, may this be a metaphor how genetic/chromosome encoding reshuffles itself, and this approximates some common minimalist packaging of the DNA among all these fifty(++?) programming languages? Can we consider this Quine Relay as a `prequel' ancestral "Hello Dad" gene, and also, how its wonderful aesthetic creativity, familiar layperson recognizable and understandable information and charming symbols at myriad representation levels, is enhancing its survival as a persistent executable(living?) `gene-meme'? Eg, is anyone else posting some of this on Facebook?

Anyone care to explain how this actually works?

Per the explanation linked in the discussion [1], the initial file generates code in another language. That code, when executed, generates code in yet another language. The process continues until the output is the code of the original file.

[1] https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

What is unclear to me is how the final program manages to represent the entire code (thus the entire language loop). Wouldn't doing that make the source code recursive and infinite? Or am I missing something important?

No more recursive or infinite than any other self-replicator that has intermediate "bodies".

EDIT: To clarify, there's actually a wrapper script on top of it all that tells the first script to execute, storing its output in file 2, then execute file 2 with language 2, then execute file 3 with language 3, and so on.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/code-gen...

This is a neat project but somehow the implementation is a lot less mind bending than the definition. Which is rather the opposite of what I experienced when I first heard of a Quine and figured out how to write one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing), Turbo Pascal in my case, heh).

This smacks of something else, perhaps art.

Look at that Wikipedia article under "Multiquines"

We already have lots of single-language quines, which are programs that output exactly their own source code when evaluated. In other words, there's a text C and a function F such that F(C) == C (i.e. C is a fixed point of F), where F is a single programming language evaluator and C is a source code file.

In this case, however, the function F happens to be the composition of a bunch of individual functions. So F is equivalent to Rexx ∘ R ∘ Python ∘ Prolog, but with many more functions composed than I am willing to type right now. This doesn't change the nature of what we're searching for, which is simply a fixed point of a given function. Realistically, of course, it makes it more difficult and impressive for someone to actually accomplish, but mathematically/computationally speaking it's the same thing.

If you look at the ruby source file[1], you'll see that the first thing it does is take all of its source and put it in a variable $s. Then it evaluates the source code in that variable, with that source having access to itself as a string. All of the intermediate representations could easily contain this string in its entirety (and they likely do). Hopefully you can see now how it's not so impossible (but still ridiculously awesome!)

[1] https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

Representing self is actually not that difficult or mind-bending; you just need a representation that is isomorphic to the program source. For instance, you could store the ASCII symbols in an integer array:

  int array = { ... } // holds the source code,
                      //  except its own representation

  int array_index; // The index in the source code
                   // (where the actual integers in
                   // array interpreted as source appear)

  for i = 0 to array_index:
    print (array[i] as an ASCII character)

  for i = 0 to array_length:
    print (array[i] as integer ++ ", ")

  for i = array_index + 1 to array_length:
    print (array[i] as an ASCII character)

The core idea is that you can interpret `array` in two ways, as an array of integers or an array of ascii characters representing the program source. The only difficult part is adjusting array_index. With a little effort, this can be scaled to a chain of languages.

It is based on the recursion theorem from computability theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene's_recursion_theorem

It is a fun exercise to understand the theorem and its proof (and still probably easier than creating an actual quine).

I thought I understood recursion, but apparently I need to understand recursion first.

Quines work the same way as cellular reproduction. I don't think there are any life forms that carry alternation of generations out to 50 different stages, though; the most I've heard of is two.

Awe inspiring stuff! But as a Ruby illiterate, I am left wondering what it is about the Ruby language that draws in such a level of creative / abstract / esoteric genius to use it as a starting point. Is there something about Ruby in particular, or is just a case of an individual obsessing over a craft?

Oh. My. God.

That post discusses six languages but others can be easily added.

This is cool of course, but we are even more interested in knowing the mechanics and how it is done.

This is relevant to any similar cool thing what gets submitted on HN.

"what" is interesting, "how" is much more interesting.

He should add Subleq or some other OISC! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

Remember those delightful self-referential Scott Kim creations in Godel Escher Bach? Here, made alive, and becomes most everything in the known coder's world. A super-chameleon quine mime.

I love his sense of humor too: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/issues/10

Welcome to social coding: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/issues

The arrangement of the languages is alphabetical, did this complicate things at all? Would it have been simpler in a different order (though less elegant)?

This is really cool. Considering installing Ubuntu to give it a try (don't think I could be bothered trying to get all those packages manually).

Someone should create a vagrant box for this.

This is amazing. Think the concept can be taken to another level in some way? Begin a universal translator of some small level?

What, no Erlang? Sheesh! Amazing work.

Holy crap. Codeception, now I can write in one language and run in every language :)

If someone tries this, please post a video from start to finish. This is incredible.

Well, someone clearly paid attention in Programming Languages class :)

why did you choose that order, is there a reason for it?

I think it's just alphabetical, so no particular path through the languages that he saw as easier/harder

I think the code has a generator framework, so the fact that they are alphabetical may just be convenient/arbitrary; the code could be generated to run in any order (I think).

How does one debug code like this?

you dont. When you reach level zen, you write code that's already bug free :]

That 'level zen' sounds like a state that doesn't exist.

meta(N^K)

If you could go ahead and explain WHY...that'd be grreeeaaaat!

I now know what a quine is. And learned of about 15 new programming languages.

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