Author of this silly project here!<p>Sharing a bit of backstory on why I decided to work on this; Firstly, “for fun” but primarily because I felt like I started losing the childlike wonder/whimsy I once had with programming.<p>So I started this new hobby where I ask myself “can I hack on this?” upon getting/seeing something.<p>For instance, I got this new Aula F75 keyboard (really good keyboard for the price btw, it sounds good too!) and it only has dedicated control software for Windows. So I downloaded the driver files, software executable, and manual sheet and reverse engineered the full protocol/packets and rebuilt it for my Mac. Then played snake with the backlights. Fun.<p>Anywho, happy to see my blog on the front page. Would love to hear if anyones going through something similar or working on silly little projects! :)
Great post, thanks for sharing it!<p>When I saw the title, I thought of Lambda Calculus[0] and SKI combinators[1]. Given that there are "only six useful colors", I wonder if M&Ms could be used to implement them.<p>0 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus</a><p>1 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus</a>
Funny you mention that, because yes, a combinator-style encoding is probably a cleaner fit for the “only six colors constraint than my stack machine. I hacked together a tiny SKI-flavored M&M reducer as a proof of concept: B=S, G=K, R=I, Y=(, O=), and N... is a free atom, so `B G G NNN` reduces to `a2`.<p>Gist: <a href="https://gist.github.com/mufeedvh/db930a423fdce8c1d8e495c7a3ffdcdb" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/mufeedvh/db930a423fdce8c1d8e495c7a3f...</a>
Fun project! I had a similar project a while back, but my medium of choice was the Uno card game. I called it UnoScript [1] and it had similar mechanisms as color was an important factor. I also ended with a stack as the main part of the language, where different colors/combinations of cards could read from/modify the stack. Interesting how similar constraints can lead to some similar design choices!<p>[1](<a href="https://github.com/berlinquin/UnoScript" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/berlinquin/UnoScript</a>)
This makes the world a better place. I got a little oxytocin hit just from the thought that somewhere on this world, someone is working on this problem. Now I'll be kinder to old ladies and give those poor puppies a pass.
Does this work with real candy?
It’s funny until one guy spills his bag of M&M’s and accidentally deletes the production database.
Will read this later, but in the meantime, if you're into “physical programming”, check out efghij: <a href="https://esolangs.org/wiki/Efghij" rel="nofollow">https://esolangs.org/wiki/Efghij</a>
What color is your function?
Looking forward to the first LLM&M coding agent
It's all fun and games until some fat bastard like me decides he wants a snack. Incidentally, which flavor? Asking for a friend.
This is what HN is all about
Thank you.Awesome project!<p>Unfortunately I think you have given my kids one more hard to refuse reason to get more candy: I need more storage.
I can't see it explained, why/where is 000000 defined as newline?
it actually sounds like a fun idea, but i have one question. do you think a lightweight CNN trained on synthetic candy layouts would outperform the deterministic decoder for messy real world photos?
Yes, for messy real-world photos a lightweight CNN would probably outperform the deterministic decoder, but I’d still use it in a hybrid pipeline with classic CV for blob detection and deterministic logic for reconstructing the actual program.
but can it run Doom?
oh man the program just melted in my mouth
this is so cool!
This is AI slop but mildly amusing. Brainfuck did it first.
Not really the same, but made me think of this classic xkcd: <a href="https://xkcd.com/505/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/505/</a>
Am I allowed to use the term psychopath in the most loving, even inspired, way?