Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)

The lines don't seem to be over 80 chars long. It's code golf so it's still going to be hard to read but the 80 char lines are acceptable in most code bases.

oneeyedpigeon• 11 years ago

Come on, were you really expecting that animation to be done in, like, 6 statements? Even once you understand the current of compression ratios minification of c code can achieve, this is still impressive. I bet the 'uncompressed' version of this code would still be interesting. Actually - here's where I kinda agree with you - it would probably be much more interesting, since we'd be able to understand it more readily.

a1k0n6• 11 years ago

I transformed the code into something sort of readable, although still somewhat difficult to understand:

https://gist.github.com/a1k0n/15f6cc2fc9428d6fd197

cgriswald• 11 years ago

"Lines of C" is an arbitrary and relatively meaningless metric. Even number of characters would have more meaning and perhaps be more interesting than number of 'lines'. Unless you define a "line" as 80 characters (in which case you really have a rough estimation of character count).

Nonetheless, these things are fun and often novel, both in what they accomplish and how they accomplish it. I like looking at them (not always reading them) for many of the same reasons I like looking at brainfuck or perl code. Plus, you know, compression. ;)

Retr0spectrum• 11 years ago

"[Update 10/21/2015: Changed the title from "six lines of C" to "462 bytes of C" to avoid endless arguments about what constitutes a line of C code.]"

userbinator2• 11 years ago

Even if you run a formatter over the source and rename the variables to some longer names, these tiny programs are still algorithmically impressive. Otherwise they'd be nearly trivial to generate from bigger ones by running minifiers on them.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

Many where like minimally functioning PoC. When I thought about raytracing I always assumed large code base. Watching the bare principle in a snippet is pretty awesome.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

Sometimes it's more than lexical minification though, you also learn a bit about the grammar and how to express something in fewer bits. Even tiny design tricks, like encoding binary as chars to express data.

david-given• 11 years ago

This kind of game was common in BBC Basic, way back in the 80s and 90s. It was limited to 255-ish tokens per line. (Excitingly, the keyboard buffer was 255 characters, but each keyword was tokenised to a single byte. Which meant that with trickery it was possible to get lines of Basic longer than it was actually possible to edit.)

At least one of the computer magazines of the day had a regular column of one-line BBC Basic programs sent in by readers. There were some quite good games.

Alas, I suspect that most of these have been lost to history, but here's a one-line Tetris:

        0d=d:IFdVDUd:a=POINT(32*POS,31-VPOS<<5):RETURNELSEMODE9:GCOL-9:CLG:O
    FF:d=9:REPEATVDU30:REPEATGOSUBFALSE:IFPOS=28VDUPOS,15,VPOS,24;11,26:IF0E
    LSEIFa=0PRINT:UNTIL0ELSEUNTILVPOS=25:v=ABSRNDMOD7:i=0:VDU4895;3:REPEATm=
    9-INKEY6MOD3:FORr=TRUETO1:t=rANDSGNt:IFt=rCOLOURv-15:VDUrEORm:i+=m=7AND9
    -6*r:IF0ELSEFORn=0TO11:d=n/3OR2EORd:GOSUBFALSE:IF1<<(n+i)MOD12AND975AND&
    C2590EC/8^vVDU2080*ABSr;:t+=a:IF0ELSENEXT,:VDU20:UNTILt*LOGm:UNTILVPOS=3

http://survex.com/~olly/rheolism/dsm_rheolism/

swiley• 11 years ago

Maybe it would be better to just specify the length of the source file in bytes, so we don't have these weird arguments about line length.

a1k0n6• 11 years ago

I went ahead and changed the title on my site, because I am also sick of that comment.

dang• 11 years ago

A little late, but we've followed suit above.

inoop2• 11 years ago

My personal favorite is Viznut's classic signature:

    #include <math.h> /* outputs 8 kHz 8-bit unsigned pcm to stdout */
    main(v,i,z,n,u,t){for(v=-1;;)for(n=pow(/* gcc -lm sig.c;./a.out>/dev/dsp */
    1.06,"`cW`g[`cgcg[eYcb^bV^eW^be^bVecb^"[++v&31]+(v&64)/21),i=999;i;putchar(
    128+((8191&u)>i?0:i/8)-((8191&(z+=n))*i-->>16)))u+=v&1?t/2: (t=v&6?t:n/4);}

edit: fixed copy/paste error

e19293001• 11 years ago

Got an error when I compile:

     $  gcc -lm sig.c
     sig.c: In function ‘main’:
     sig.c:3: error: expected ‘;’ before numeric constant

Fixed this statement:

< i=9 99;

i=999;

Garbage is displayed when I execute the code.

Rotten194• 11 years ago

You have to pipe it into an audio player (traditionally that was /dev/dsp IIRC but I don't think that's a thing anymore). aplay should work with the right flags.

a1k0n6• 11 years ago

I am a big fan of viznut also, and took the liberty of translating this into Javascript so we can all hear it without trying to find a /dev/dsp analog (I used ./viznut | sox -t raw -e unsigned -b 8 -r 8000 - -d):

https://jsbin.com/tazeyoqoci/edit?html,output

Amazing work.

inoop2• 11 years ago

Hey wow, this is great, thanks!

a1k0n6• 11 years ago

48kHz version, sounds slightly better: https://jsbin.com/zazifecaqe/1/edit?html,output

cantrevealname• 11 years ago

You can do super dense mathematical code in the ancient APL programming language[1]. I wonder how even more tiny this program could get at the hands of an APL expert if any still exist.

Here are some complete APL programs[2] to give a flavor of just how dense it can get:

Sum integers from 1 to 100:

  +/ι100

Find all primes from 2 to a given number R:

  (∼R∈R◦.×R)/R←1↓ιR

Play Conway's Game of Life:

  life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29

[2] http://www.vaxman.de/publications/apl_slides.pdf

robotmlg• 11 years ago

I've always enjoyed this video of a guy showing how to write Conway's Game of Life in APL, step by step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

a1k0n6• 11 years ago

Speaking of crazy ascii company logo animations, I never got a chance to golf these down, but I made some with color and signed distance field ray marching:

https://github.com/a1k0n/asciitracing

userbinator2• 11 years ago

I think raymarching is an extremely elegant way to make complex scenes fit into a tiny amount of space. These are my favourite articles on raymarching because it shows just how compact they can be - a single mathematical equation:

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctio...

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/raymarchingdf/raymarching...

Edit: The description for the "bridge" scene is interesting: "This is a sketch really, but it never got completed, due to the lack of artistic appealing of the image." I don't know if it's his extreme humility, but I think it wouldn't be overexaggerating if I said it's one of the best scenes on that page.

anon4• 11 years ago

One more crazy thing you can do with raymarching - smoothly twine any shape into any other shape. Take any two signed distance fields, say they're defined by the functions dist0(p) and dist1(p). Then you can do

    dist(p, t) = (1-t)*dist0(p) + t*dist1(p)

T doesn't have to be time-based, it can be space-based, so you have a shape that's a cylinder on the bottom and a large sphere on top and here's a mushroom https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsSXWc

Edit: I have a very strong feeling that in most cases the resulting function isn't a "proper" distance field, but you can still raymarch through it normally.

bhickey• 11 years ago

Andy, you're very much to ascii rendering what Inigo is to the demo scene. I hope Milwaukee has been treating you well.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

Always enjoyed your previous projects. This one doesn't disappoint. Do you live in a tty ?

dheera• 11 years ago

Wonder if someone can create a startup to do Obfuscated-C-Code-as-a-service.

cfarre• 11 years ago

me too

hliyan• 11 years ago

Perhaps we should consider replacing line count with something like "parameter weighted statement count" as a measure of software size?

seyfulislam• 11 years ago

Everything is six lines when you have semicolon.

onion2k• 11 years ago

That's very cool.

You can do something similar using Chrome's console output. There used to be an intro that worked by rendering a canvas as ascii but it's broken in newer Chrome - http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/console.log/ (it may work for other people). I figured out how it works and made a little animation to explore the principle - http://ooer.com/console/i.html (You'll need to change the height of the console to fit 16 lines of output)

z3r0d4v3• 11 years ago

if you have some time to kill...

http://mnml.is/hn/jslinux.jpg

Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)

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