Re: Interesting one-line BASIC program

[Roger Johnstone <roger@roger.geek.nz.removethisbit>]

In <47ebc7eb$0$20462$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au> tonza wrote:
> On 2008-03-26 23:44:43 +1100, Jake Featherston 
> <Jake_Featherston@comcast.net> said:
> 
>> I came up with this in 1984 or '85.  Its a lot of fun.  Sometimes not
>> much happens, but occasionally you get some really peculiar and
>> unexpected results.  Here it is:
>> 
>> 10 A=INT(RND(1)*65535)+1:B=INT(RND(1)*256):POKE A,B:GOTO 10
>> 
>> Just sit back and watch the chaos....
> 
> And how is this program at all interesting?!

If you leave it running long enough it will eventually reproduce the 
complete works of Shakespeare.

I saw a program once for the BBC micro which would fill its 32 KiB of 
RAM with every possible combination of program. All it did was start 
with the memory cleared and stepped through incrementing each address. 
This was guaranteed to produce every single possible RAM-resident 
program, including incredible new applications that no one had ever 
dreamt of.

Unfortunately it would take quite some time for it to complete. A 32 KiB 
memory has 2^19 or 524304 bits, which can hold 2^524304 different 
programs. It would take much longer than the current age of the universe 
just to do every combination for the first 10 bytes. That doesn't take 
into consideration the fact that each possible program has to be tested 
by someone to see if it does something interesting.

-- 
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand -> http://roger.geek.nz