What is the Codex?
Some of you might have played with emulators which let your PC pretend to be the classic computers of your youth (the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Commodore 64 and so on). The emulators work by simulating the processors in those machines on your PC, so you end up with Chuckie Egg running on a virtual BBC Micro running on a PC running on whatever the underlying physics of the universe happen to be.
robhu found a puzzle based on a similar idea. The International Conference on Functional Programming have an annual contest. Last year’s was particularly fun:
In 1967, during excavation for the construction of a new shopping center in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, workers uncovered a vault containing a cache of ancient scrolls. Most were severely damaged, but those that could be recovered confirmed the existence of a secret society long suspected to have been active in the region around the year 200 BC… Among the documents found intact in the Monroeville collection was a lengthy codex, written in no known language and inscribed with superhuman precision.
You’re given the codex, and the specification for a processor used by the Cult of the Bound Variable. Once you’ve written an emulator for that processor, you’re off (unless, like me, you write the emulator in a few hours and spend half a day corrupting the files from the contest website with your editor and wondering why it isn’t working). There’s an ancient Unix system, complete with ancient spam, and various puzzles which I’ve not had a chance to look at yet.
According to reports on the contest, lots of people tried to write the emulator in high level languages where it ran like treacle. A C implementation like mine (which may count as a spoiler for people who want to do it themselves) without any namby-pamby array bounds checking nonsense works fast enough that you can’t tell you’re not talking to a real ancient Unix system. There’s life in the C language yet.
I’m lost in admiration for the people who produced the codex. It required writing a compiler backend targeting the fictional processor, and implementing various other languages on top of that, as well as coming up with the puzzles. I’m not sure how far I’ll get with the puzzles before my ability or patience expires, as I’m a hacker rather than a computer scientist, but still, the thing is amazingly cool. It’s a time sink for geeks, so I pass it on to those of you who, like me, will waste many days on it. Have fun.