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On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)

Tom Wildenhain

30K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 11 people: 8 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 2 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2020.
  • Presented by Tom Wildenhain

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

1.2M views9 years ago11 recommendations

Computer scienceComputation and complexityAlgorithms

Tom Wildenhain demonstrates that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete by building a working Turing machine inside a slide deck.

Video highlighting my research on PowerPoint Turing Machines for CMU's SIGBOVIK 2017 Read the paper: tomwildenhain.com/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf Download the TM: tomwildenhain.com/PowerPointTM/PowerPointTM.pptx Original video (without live background noise): youtu.be/sdkxWqsk17c Music: The Land Of The Wizard by Machinimasound licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Please check out my other videos for (slightly) more serious work.

Why it's here

11 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently recommend this hilarious and witty presentation as a classic example of proving unusual systems to be Turing complete.

u/AndroidUser8358in r/compsci • Recommends

PowerPoint is Turing Complete!
668View on Reddit

calvinon Lobsters • Recommends

On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint `satire`, not because it is, because I want it to be. (Paper)
15View on Lobsters

aeleoson Hacker News • Recommends

On “HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel (2017) [video]”

This is very similar in style to my favorite presentation and paper of all time, titled On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint 0. The research, presentation and paper were all created inside of powerpoint and it is probably the greatest thing ever made. If you enjoyed the above video you will definitely enjoy this. 0 link to this video
View on Hacker News

stanlarroqueon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Age of Empires 2 Scenario Editor Is Turing Complete”

I can only think of one of the greatest videos0 on Youtube when I read about unusual Turing complete systems. 0 link to this video
View on Hacker News

K0SM0Son Hacker News • Recommends

On “The “No Code” Delusion”

I think this drives your point with incredible wit: “On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)” by Tom Wildenhain1. (5 minutes video) 1: link to this video (Nerding out should always be hilarious like that!) 2: Recording of a guest lecture he gave for the Esoteric Programming Languages course at CMU. (~1h) link
View on Hacker News

floatbothon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What’s your favorite talk from 2017?”

On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint link to this video Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper link HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! link Zebras All the Way Down link Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends link Console Security - Switch link Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel link Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads link Sharing the Chisel link (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)
View on Hacker News

codepieon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Lessons from Optics, the Other Deep Learning”

The former paper appeared in SIBVOIK 2017 ( link ), where you can find other such papers. My personal favorites are "On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint" ( link to this video ) and "Automated Distributed Execution of LLVM code using SQL JIT Compilation" > Following the popularity of MapReduce, a whole ecosystem of Apache Incubator Projects has emerged that all solve the same problem. Famous examples include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pikachu, Apache Pig, German Spark and Apache Hive 1
View on Hacker News

kgrizzleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae”

Reminds me of a related project presented at SIGBOVIK demonstrating the Turing completeness of PowerPoint. It is also art. link to this video
View on Hacker News

bschneon Hacker News • Recommends

On “3D engine on MS Excel without VBA (2018) [video]”

For another completely insane but kind of fun way to abuse an office application, see "On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint" 1. (Gwern has a whole list of accidentally/surprisingly turing-complete things at 2) 1. link to this video 2. link
View on Hacker News

alpaca128on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?”

If you liked the Game of Life running a Game of Life simulation you might enjoy the YT video0 showing someone's functioning raycasting engine within the game world of Factorio using thousands of machines and parts provided by the game. It blew my mind. What I also found quite amusing was the PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the Turing-completeness of PowerPoint animations1. I'll never get tired of this kind of tinkering walking the line between genius and a healthy portion of crazy. 0 link 1 link to this video
View on Hacker News

u/tankpussin r/compsci • Recommends

On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint
1View on Reddit

u/TROPAFLIGHT2in r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “Tic-tac-toe implemented in a single call to printf()”

I mean, even Microsoft PowerPoint is turing complete. What *isn't* turing complete these days? **Anything** can be turing complete if it can emulate a turing machine. The preliminaries section does a good job explaining the building blocks they use. The big one is: > `%n` takes a pointer and writes (!!) the number of bytes printed so far. So you got arbitrary memory manipulation right there. They have branching too, but I'm still trying to understand how it works myself...
8View on Reddit

u/syklemilconsidered harmfulin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions

On “Is there a programming language that simply cant be used to program a game, at least not without extreme trouble?”

The funniest might be Powerpoint. You can essentially make a P''-like system in it where you advance time by clicking, and it's Turing-complete, so you _can_ write a game in that system, but it would make running Doom in the Typescript types look smooth and easy.
7View on Reddit

u/zenylin r/dotnet • Mentions

On “Mods we getting loads of questions from accounts asking is .net worth it. Please stop letting all through. ”

Excel, it's Turing Complete. link to this video
5View on Reddit

avaron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs”

Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: link to this video
View on Hacker News

dhxon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What Works and Why: Opus Magnum”

Someone created a bf interpreter using this game: link Also of interest may be similar attempts to create computers in other games and applications: OpenTTD: link Minecraft: link PowerPoint: link to this video
View on Hacker News