Meatfighter

Love the monochrome gallery of examples https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/monochrome-gallery.html

> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Not to take away from this truly amazing write-up (wow), but there's at least one generator that uses shape: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ See particularly the image right above where it says "Note how the algorithm selects the largest characters that fit within the outlines of each colored region." There's also a description at the bottom of how its algorithm works, if anyone wants to compare.

Awesome. This is the cleanest ascii-art tool I've seen, so far. To date, I've been using https://asciiflow.com/#/ and https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ to create input text for TerminalTextEffects to create terminal animations like the following: https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/changeblog_media… https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects

> Would love a web version that's easily usable though; as much as I live in the terminal, just too much of a mental burden installing a new package. The link is above the fold: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/spa/index.html#/

He was a proponent of a style of programming that was reasonable... you could reason about it and prove / demonstrate that it is doing what it should within that block of code as being correct. Imagine teaching someone BASIC or FORTRAN... IF (IA .GT. 0 .AND. IB .GT. 0 .AND. IC .GT. 0) GOTO 10 WRITE (6, 602) 602 FORMAT (42H IA, IB, AND IC MUST BE GREATER THAN ZERO.) STOP 1 10 CONTINUE Or for something more complicated... https://github.com/ArthurFerreira2/STARTREK/blob/master/startrek.bas ... and arguably, that's well structured (its not doing a GOTO into the middle of a subroutine... I think). Tangent to that source code https://meatfighter.com/startrek1971/ for a port to C# (with line numbered goto). Dijkstra's approach to programming help take software development from a craft where each woodworker did things their own way and going from one shop to another meant relearning everything to something were one could more easily reason about how an application worked by removing some of the ability to write unstructured code. You can still write it... and I'm sure you can find some code that is convoluted ("... the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/real-programmers.html ). Structured programming is also easier to teach. Yes, you can teach people how to write line numbered BASIC but the challenge is also teaching them discipline to not cut off their fingers when doing…

the claim is that this is theoretically possible in stock tetris with only one modification: an infinite board (with a floor). the infinite board solves piece randomization, because you can have a "junkyard" where you dump pieces until you get the one you want. it also solves the time pressure, because blocks spawned at row inifinity will never reach the canvas until you hard-drop them. finally, it prevents rows from clearing because they have infinite width (so the game won't interfere with your construction). their concept for gates is that if you nudge a block at a certain row as it's falling, it will either shift one column over or be blocked. this page is a good visualization: https://meatfighter.com/tetromino-computer/inverter-not.html except... once you hard-drop a block in tetris, you can't nudge it. and if you don't hard-drop it, it will never reach your canvas. they kind-of hand-wave this in the section "infinite playfield". after describing the mechanics of a hard drop, they say: > A more generalized version, the semihard drop, attempts to vertically translate the piece from “row infinity” to a specified, finite row. if the fall timer can't get the block into a finite row, how would a player (without hard-dropping)? loved reading through this, though. the animations were perfect for describing the mechanism! very high-quality documentation for a fun project.

Typing in BASIC programs from magazines… brings back memories. Remember the Mad Magazine that had a program to draw Alfred E. Neumann? Here I just found it: https://meatfighter.com/mad/ That and going to the weird room at the dept. of education across from the library that kept drawers full of floppies and sifting through all the random public domain code & shareware.

dedication to create an svg version... https://meatfighter.com/mad/mad.svg

I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on. Luckily, someone else succeeded: https://meatfighter.com/mad/

Coolest page on the site: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/color-gallery.html

And this article describes a simplified version of the NES Tetris randomiser. The actual one is barely distinguishable from the described one, but is technically a bit biased[0]. I made a small script to compare randomiser probabilities a couple of months ago[1], in which I wrote a vaguely readable version of the NES randomiser. [0]: https://meatfighter.com/nintendotetrisai/#Picking_Tetriminos [1]: https://pastebin.com/XumxE1tV

I recently stumbled upon a blog post by Mike Birken where he describes a 2006 meeting with Steve Wozniak at a Barnes & Noble. (https://meatfighter.com/woz/) Apparently, Wozniak had played a prank in the 70s where he created a fake advertisement for Zaltair, a fictitious successor to the MITS Altair computer built around the Zilog Z80 instead of the Intel 8080. He copied some of the worst ads he could find for wording and distributed the brochures at the West Coast Computer Faire. Birken recreated the brochure and was able to get Wozniak to sign it. Interestingly, Wozniak was carrying laser-cut stainless-steel business cards, which he handed out at the Barnes & Noble event.

From https://meatfighter.com/tetromino-computer/input-language.html > In practice, IL programs direct the agent to construct a pile near the origin that progressively grows taller and wider. That being the case, it can work with a Tetris implementation that defines “row infinity” as a finite row whose index increases as a function of the number of spawns. In such an implementation, the agent emulates a semihard drop with a finite number of soft drops.

Hey there \o. original author of said hubba article :) Just wanted to offer some missing bits you might find interesting, specifically, the third function you don't recognise is the random function from the original Tetris on the NES. It comes from the article[0] that went through all the asm of the NES Tetris cartridge. And yup, that first one is quite quite terrible for random - it came from some of the first results in StackOverflow intentionally looking for something that was overly simple and "bad" at random. But really the article was about testing and visualising how your own random functions might be. [0]: https://meatfighter.com/nintendotetrisai/#Picking_Tetriminos

If that brought a tear to your eye, you might enjoy: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816 "Puls" by Řrřola, 256b, MS-Dos Along with this interesting explanation https://meatfighter.com/puls/ of what's happening with the "binary-search" raytracing, lattice-effect, and tricks to make it fit in 256b.

Most of the Tetris versions since 2001 are theoretically able to go on forever[1]. Even the old NES version which doesn't have the same cyclic bag randomization is able to be played far enough to be considered infinite by some[2]. Your life however, has no such guarantee of fixed randomness and you might be forced into a losing situation. [1]https://tetris.wiki/Playing_forever [2]http://meatfighter.com/nintendotetrisai/

Project Amiga Juggler: http://meatfighter.com/juggler/ Step by step tutorial in Java.

Overlapping instructions/data is something also commonly encountered in tiny demos (512b and below), e.g. http://meatfighter.com/puls/ and http://finalpatch.blogspot.ca/2014/06/dissecting-128-byte-raycaster.ht… I have no doubt that viruses of the computer kind also have made use of such techniques; and overlapping for obfuscation, not size-optimisation, is also a commonly seen trick in malware.

To skip the Tetris rules and read the A.I. parts, go to http://meatfighter.com/nintendotetrisai/#The_Algorithm

The web version never finishes (Chromium-based browser), but the CLI version works. https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/spa/index.html#/ Obligatory pandering: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@T@@@@L@@@@@@@@@@@Wg@@@@/@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@\@@@@L@@@@@@@@@DJ@@@@'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@\@@@@\@@@@@@@Dj@@@@,@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@'@@@@\@@@@@@{@@@@,@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@'@@@@\@@@WJ@@@@/@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@,@@@@,@DJ@@@@/@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@\@@@@\/@@@W/@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@L@@@@@@@Pj@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@LQ@@@@PA@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@[@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@g …

Yup: http://meatfighter.com/superman3/part1/