Welcome to the eighteenth Learn You A Lang for Great Good! Today, we'll be learning BitCycle, a minimalist language that involves moving bits around a 2D playfield. During the event, feel free to post CMCs to practice BitCycle (BCMCs), ask questions about the language, and so on.
@AidenChow So the basic concept is that you've got a playfield and you've got bits. Bits move around the playfield. At each step, all the bits move one space simultaneously.
@AidenChow So here's a simple example showing how the bits move (try the Step button if Run is too fast to see what's going on).
Green diamonds are 1 bits, blue circles are 0 bits
And here's a simple example with input. The input 10 comes out of the ? source one bit at a time. Note how the splitter / is used to split off the first bit and make it go a different direction.
-u lets you input a list of unsigned integers. It converts the integers to unary and uses 0 to separate them. For example, an input of 1,2,3 is converted to 10110111.
Yep. When a bit goes into it, two bits come out: a duplicated version and a negated version.
The copy turns right, the negative copy turns left.
If you feed the outputs of a dupneg back into the dupneg, each of the two bits will get duplicated again, so you'll have four bits. Then if you feed those four back in, you'll get eight... and so on with exponential growth. This is very similar to how a fork bomb works, so when emanresu A posted one tonight, I called it a dupneg bomb.
Which collectors come open first depends on alphabetical order. So for example, the A collectors always open if they have any bits in them. But if no A collectors have bits, then the B collectors open. If neither A nor B has bits, then C opens, etc. For example.
@AidenChow There's a fair amount of undefined behavior, and I don't remember how I implemented it exactly. The JavaScript implementation does some things differently from the Python implementation.
@AidenChow This is actually very foundational to nontrivial programming in BitCycle, because it allows you to create loops and handle arbitrarily long streams of bits.
Usually we post CMCs, Chat Mini Challenges. During the language learning event every other week, we post challenges that are specific to the language we're learning.
@AidenChow separate the 0s and 1s from the input into different stacks, interweave them, Whenever you see a 0, discard the next bit, if you see a 1, print a 1 and interweave the zeroes again
BitCycle -u, 67 bytes
v <
v1< v1<
Bv>CAv
v~~ v<
> Cv> !
v~~
> ^
\ 101^
Try it online!
It's beautiful... I have some idea of how this works.
The A, B and C are collectors. when the field is empty, the first non-empty collector (sorting in alphabetical order) has all collectors ...
I'm trying to learn from Jo King's techniques, such as storing two numbers in the same collector using 1s for one and 0s for the other, and interleaving two numbers using undefined behavior. ;)
Palindromic Powers
Powers
We define an important power as a number that can be represented as \$ x^y \$ where \$ x >= 2 \$ and \$ y>=2 \$.
Palindrome
We define an important palindrome as a number that is the same written forwards and backward, and is greater than 10. Thus, the last digit must not...
To give you an idea of how programming is, I trhrew an error by gettting the .5th character of an (error message) string because setting it up to halt properly would be worse
BitCycle -u, 67 bytes
v <
v1< v1<
Bv>CAv
v~~ v<
> Cv> !
v~~
> ^
\ 101^
Try it online!
It's beautiful... I have some idea of how this works.
The A, B and C are collectors. when the field is empty, the first non-empty collector (sorting in alphabetical order) has all collectors ...
