Okay, but why?
Counterpoint: why not?
They could have spent the time doing something good for humanity, like making their bed.
BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#12I just had to enter a complain to the Cisco security umbrella that my work uses - "I am getting tired of the high quality security checks that uses scary words in the url as a metric..."
If you have admin rights, you can disable the umbrella trashware, apparently no one notices. https://gist.github.com/jasmas/4976d359c00726cd3be1c9828aadd... I think that old script needs a path adaption.
thanks, will check it out.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#13Meh, Brainfuck is clearly inadequate as the base for a modern computer. Concurrent Brainfuck, now, that's where it's at. Forget "GPUs" and their measly "thousands" of compute units... can you imagine how many Brainfuck cores we can fit on to a system with a 5nm process? Millions, probably. If there is any system that deserves to be tagged inconceivable performance , it would be such a system.
I feel like the NUMA penalty would be high, and the coordination between so many execution units would be... painful. That said, with someone clever enough working on it, it would be boss.
NUMA is for when you have expensive processors, hence few processors, and need to share the memory. This definitely calls for just giving what would be each NUMA node its own few-hundred-thousand CPUs and letting them use a communication bus directly to talk among themselves.
"Just". Such a wonderful word in these sorts of conversations. All we have to do is "just" compile modern languages into Brainfuck for these processors, no problem. All we have to do is "just" build the hardware for the rest of the system on a radically different paradigm than all current computers. I'm sure we can "just" repurpose some FPGAs for this for prototype purposes. It's all so easy here in "just"land I'm surprised we don't "just" do it.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#14In 2023 I would expect at least a Brainfuck FPGA. Wouldn't be that hard to do. I bed somebody did that.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have admin rights, you can disable the umbrella trashware, apparently no one notices. https://gist.github.com/jasmas/4976d359c00726cd3be1c9828aadd... I think that old script needs a path adaption.
thanks, will check it out.
Nobody notices unless you have some sort of security event, at which point it's ten times as bad. If you're confident that won't happen, sure...
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#16Does anyone actually use brainfuck?
Honestly, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll just say it: Brainfuck is not a great programming language for production use-cases.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the NUMA penalty would be high, and the coordination between so many execution units would be... painful. That said, with someone clever enough working on it, it would be boss.
NUMA is for when you have expensive processors, hence few processors, and need to share the memory. This definitely calls for just giving what would be each NUMA node its own few-hundred-thousand CPUs and letting them use a communication bus directly to talk among themselves. "Just". Such a wonderful word in these sorts of conversations. All we have to do is "just" compile modern languages into Brainfuck for these pr…
GreenArrays have really cool chip that boasts "the most power efficient per instruction executed" when they released it. On the order of picojoules per cycle IIRC.
The chip has 144 independent computers (not processors -> computers)
The inventor of the Forth programming language, Chuck Moore, developed it, and is designed to execute with this parallel model in mind. A parallel Brainfuck system might be a cool project to port over to this platform.
https://www.greenarraychips.com/
Here is a talk given at Strange Loop by Chuck: https://youtu.be/0PclgBd6_Zs?si=r8FqQo4LUvdFmHbd
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
NUMA is for when you have expensive processors, hence few processors, and need to share the memory. This definitely calls for just giving what would be each NUMA node its own few-hundred-thousand CPUs and letting them use a communication bus directly to talk among themselves. "Just". Such a wonderful word in these sorts of conversations. All we have to do is "just" compile modern languages into Brainfuck for these pr…
GreenArrays have really cool chip that boasts "the most power efficient per instruction executed" when they released it. On the order of picojoules per cycle IIRC. The chip has 144 independent computers (not processors -> computers) The inventor of the Forth programming language, Chuck Moore, developed it, and is designed to execute with this parallel model in mind. A parallel Brainfuck system might be a cool project…
Yeah, I had that in mind when this idea jumped unbidden into my head.
With something less blindlingly stupid than brainfuck, it's a legitimately interesting architecture. I fear between CPUs, GPUs, and the fact that apparently we're going straight to custom hardware for neural nets, there isn't a niche for this in our world. But there certainly is a parallel universe in which we went down this road instead starting circa the late 1970s, and in that universe it is the GPUs and custom neural net architectures that are facing the uphill battle because while they may be better at their task than the 2048 "conventional" CPU systems in that world, they have a hard time being better enough to justify the investment.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
GreenArrays have really cool chip that boasts "the most power efficient per instruction executed" when they released it. On the order of picojoules per cycle IIRC. The chip has 144 independent computers (not processors -> computers) The inventor of the Forth programming language, Chuck Moore, developed it, and is designed to execute with this parallel model in mind. A parallel Brainfuck system might be a cool project…
Yeah, I had that in mind when this idea jumped unbidden into my head. With something less blindlingly stupid than brainfuck, it's a legitimately interesting architecture. I fear between CPUs, GPUs, and the fact that apparently we're going straight to custom hardware for neural nets, there isn't a niche for this in our world. But there certainly is a parallel universe in which we went down this road instead starting c…
I did it, I took the plunge and just bought a dev board.
You are definitely right on with regard to the custom hardware, but I still want want to experiment with it, and I'm pretty sure there will be good niches for such flexibility/low power operations.
There are still a lot of problems that are solved/need solving in which neural nets are superfluous/overkill for (I think).
I might try my hand at some DSP for radio or audio to start.
I'll also think I'm gonna try their Forth implementation, I've never used it before, but it seems like a pretty neat language.
Maybe Uiua stack/array programming would make for a better port down the line.
Re: BF-SYS: A fantasy computer that uses Brainfuck as its instruction set
#20Do I understand correctly that each frame one is to call the output/“.” command 33(number of pixels) times, 32(number of pixels) times for audio, and (number of pixels) for drawing to the screen?
Hm, and, the way to do this.. would it be to, before a part where you actually output the output, you first store what you intend to output in region of the tape, and then go through that part to make the output?
Also, what happens if the computations take too long and you don’t have time to compute the frame?