My first thought at seeing something pretty in so few bytes was: “perhaps you could just run through every value in each of those 484 bytes and find other gems in there too” then I did the math - or tried to… :)
Check out the BBC micro version in 432 chars (443 bytes). https://bbcmic.ro/?t=9ctpk ... That cuts your problem down by a factor of ~5.5e98. ;) Or even a lot more if you limit to readable ascii. I'd be curious if you did that how many of the tries would result in a valid runnable program.
You don't need to go anywhere near 400 bytes to find inscrutable programs, if your programming language is concise enough. Even 8 bytes, or 64 bits to be precise, offers plenty unchartered territory for finding new gems in lambda calculus [1], one such recent discovery being a 49 bit program whose output exceeds Graham's number.
I have the authors Programming Atari 2600 Games and really enjoyed it. I started my professional programming career programming in Assembler on an OS/360 mainframe back in the mid 90s and it really helped me starting out at such a low level. It was enjoyable revisiting Assembler while going through his book.
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[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 89.8 ms ] thread[1] https://oeis.org/A333479
Programming Boot Sector Games
More Boot Sector Games
I'd be very grateful for an explanation for how the first three lines in the Atari basic version that have only numbers and no alphabet work?
I just can't remember what Atari basic does, how that data is presented to be read into the array...
Thanks!
https://www.shadertoy.com/
https://www.pouet.net/
The last demo party was this one: https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1550&when=2024
And this is 64K: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=96589
Something out of this world.
It appeared on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940212
That's the spirit!