Matt Parker and Steve Mould are two of the best STEM educators on YouTube. They are both witty and experimental. Parker is a straight maths kind of guy but Mould goes all over the place and really scratches that experimental/DIY itch.
If you enjoy this video, I highly recommend checking out more of their channels.
Author of "wake up" here. Yes, that one reactivated me again. We thought (as size coding community) that we found every cellular automaton trick years ago, but then Plex came around and showed us otherwise ♥
I'm really impressed. Those are the things that made me love programming and computing. It's all so beautiful, it's TRULY art. It's a shame that in the industry we don't usually have the opportunities to make something like that, with AIs and all that...
Howdy =) I didn't spot your analysis back then, but it's (still) spot on. A tiny addition, 0xA0000 to 0xB0000 is VGA memory when using graphics modes, so it's quite safe to write there until it flows into the visual text mode memory.
I'm curious how easy it would be to run this on a Win10 or Win11 64bit PC.
Like, would it need dosbox? Virtualbox running a DOS VM?
When I try it in Dosbox I do get a very vague impression of matrix rain but no sound. The characters in the matrix rain are all uppercase and lowercase M's and U's though and they do not seem to cycle through many states at all (just partly on screen and nothing).
There are only 2^128 of such demos. How much of those are valid DOS programs? If we narrow it down to ones that generate both video and sound, I guess there are much less, which should motivate more people to try and find one :)
It is big but the preconditions shave off a lot. You need to get to display memory and also get to a sound port and need to do both in a loop where each varies. And you need to build it out of valid instructions. That puts you at more like 2^75.
Only a tiny fraction of those outputs will have any complexity. And only a tiny fraction of those will be aesthetic.
I don’t bet on us finding a -ton- of interesting sound plus video demos in 16 bytes.
16 bytes equals immediate “black magic” and “it’s a witch”. I get it in the abstract - generative art and CAs and fractals have infinite depth. But this is madness. I love it so much