Esoteric Codes

> ... He rests his whole argument on the premise that the operator is illiterate in Chinese, or at least has no access to the semantics of the material stored in the Room.

...and yet outputs semantically correct responses.

> That's plainly not the case with ChatGPT, or it couldn't review its previous answers to find and fix its mistakes.

Which is another way of saying, ChatGPT couldn't produce semantically correct output without understanding the input. Disagreeing with which is the whole point of the Chinese Room argument.

Why cannot the semantic understanding be implicitly encoded in the model? That is, why cannot the program I (as the Chinese Room automaton) am following be of sufficient complexity that my output appears to be that of an intelligent being with semantic understanding and the ability to review my answers? That, in my understanding, is where the genius of ChatGPT lies - it's a masterpiece of preprocessing and information encoding. I don't think it needs to be anything else to achieve the results it achieves.

A different example of this is the work of Yusuke Endoh, whom you may know for his famous quines. https://esoteric.codes/blog/the-128-language-quine-relay is to me one of the most astonishing feats of software engineering I've ever seen, and little short of magic - but at its heart it's 'just' very clever encoding. Each subsequent program understands nothing and yet encodes every subsequent program including itself. Another example is DNA; how on…

Hi, I’m the author of the book and arriving (a bit late) to clarify a few things.

Although I discuss esolang history in the Spectrum piece (something I get deeper into on my blog, https://esoteric.codes), the book is a monograph of my esolangs specifically: Folders, Entropy, Olympus and more; some are collected at https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs. It’s meant to make esolangs approachable, focusing on concept rather than technical aspects of the languages. I wrote it to encourage people to experiment with esolangs and to show the community-based nature of the work: the delightful conversation that happens when another programmer takes your language in a direction you would never have conceived of.

The languages range from fully implemented works to pieces that are not implementable (e.g. Past Tense is a language whose programs are not runnable by definition and would cease to be programs if they were https://github.com/rottytooth/PastTense). There’s one where even articulating a program into words or symbols invalidates it: only unreified thought is valid.

The languages are presented first as prompts. In the second half, I present details on those that are implemented, showing the sometimes surprising results of carrying out the initial idea. I hope it will expand the conversation around esoteric languages as an art form.

So, skipping over the 'tune fs'[0] for a ["lexx !yacc"] | ['less is more'] | [less filling]/[tastes great] programming might be more clear after things such as [1] as long as OpenAI forms not used.

Or perhaps not, if strange loops are a haskell [2].

But clear understandings of diffferent ways to think about language construction/programming can be found at [3][4][5] without resorting to non-math/computer science language construction/programming via Linguistics / Humanities field(s)[6][7].

[0] "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish" : https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html?

[1] EGB : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

[2] : Lob and mob: stange loops in Haskell (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34578411

[3] Esoteric.codes : https://esoteric.codes/

[4] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

[5] A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Programming Languages' : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206055

[6] : "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"by Guy Deutscher

[7] : "In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius" by Arika Okrent

Well I've been a big fan of 100r since I heard of them through the Future of Coding [0][1](and esoteric.codes [2]).

BUT JUST NOW I'm kicking around the website again today and find out that Devine made the game Hiversaires way back in the day [3] which is a banger. So I guess I've been a fan for like 12 years. I'm very tempted to buy it again.

100r are also an inspiration that a different way of life and relationship with creativity and society are possible... so if I ever drop out definitely don't look for me doing permacomputing on a sailboat in coastal BC. Don't look for me - because I won't want to be found, ok thanks in advance?

[0] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

[1] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045

[2] https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits

[3] https://100r.co/site/hiversaires.html

A BLC interpreter [1] won in the 2012 International Obfuscated C Code contest [2].

BLC provides a functional busy beaver function [3] that is more fine-grained than the TM-based one.

The byte oriented version BLC8 is one of the 128 languages in the quine relay [3].

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c

[2] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html

[3] https://oeis.org/A333479

[4] https://esoteric.codes/blog/the-128-language-quine-relay

Photography:

- William Klein

- Helen Levitt

- Sergio Larrain

- Jane English

- Josef Koudelka

Generative coding:

- Inigo Quilez - https://iquilezles.org/

- Shelby Wilson - https://shelby.cool/

- David OReilly - https://www.davidoreilly.com/

- Rekka and Devine - https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits

- David Whiting - https://www.vitling.xyz/