Quine Relay

[danso]

I know we shouldn't care about the source, crazy-insane as he obviously is, but FWIW, the author is Yusuke Endoh, one of the Ruby core members. RubySource had an interview with him here:

http://rubysource.com/meet-fifteen-ruby-core-committers/

He lists his "hobby in programming" as: "writing a Quine and enjoying esoteric programming."

[minikomi]

Indeed, the Japanese ruby community has quite a few interesting characters like this.. In fact, someone even wrote a book about using ruby as a base for creating esoteric languages! http://www.amazon.co.jp/Ruby%E3%81%A7%E4%BD%9C%E3%82%8B%E5%A...

[tonylampada]

This is truly baffling! I had to run it on my machine, and it really works as advertised. For the curious who can't (or don't want to) install the compilers for all those languages, here's a zip file with all the intermediate files generated https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2683925/bigquine.zip

[YzzYz]

see also his "music box quine"

https://github.com/tric/trick2013/blob/master/mame1/entry.rb

from TRICK2013 (The 1st Transcendental Ruby Imbroglio Contest for rubyKaigi)

https://sites.google.com/site/trickcontest2013/

[scrumper]

I feel awful for pointing this out, but the author spelled Copyright incorrectly in the last line.

Fortunately, he can correct it without blowing out his Ascii art by deleting the extra space between '##' and 'Quine'.

I'd issue a pull request myself, but it'd be like me putting soy sauce on a piece of Jiro Ono's sushi. I am completely unworthy.

[ilyanep]

I feel like the fact that you took the time to figure out how to fix it makes you at least somewhat worthy.

[chalst]

Fixed:

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/commit/b9322a12e9598911f...

The hashes are automatically generated, it turns out.

[quchen]

But then the cycle would probably not close anymore - the end result would not be the initial code.

[cbhl]

Wouldn't you also need to fix src/QR.rb.gen.rb?

[sans-serif]

When I first spotted that, I wasn't sure if it was intentional. Maybe the comments are a part of the input.

[codeulike]

He's fixed it now!

[epidemian]

Fascinating. Even the README generator is on another level of meta: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/README.m...

[polemic]

And: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

This project isn't code, it's art.

Edit:

Heh, Brainfuck, Whitespace, Logo... and notice they're all in alphabetical order?

[Rabidgremlin]

If anyone wants to give this a go. I have created a Vagrant config which installs the OS, tools and runs the chain of programs. You can find it here: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/vagrant-quine-relay

[candeira]

I installed it yesterday. It fails at the point of Jasmin:

jasmin QR.j QR.j:2: Warning - Syntax error.

^ QR.j:2: Error - Couldn't repair and continue parse.

^ QR.j: Found 2 errors

And then completely craps out at the badly generated Java. Any idea of what goes?

[vedant]

I successfully compiled every intermediary, and posted all of the code in a gzipped tarball here: http://goo.gl/EBZFV.

I started a tiny stub post here, where I'd like to dig into the code over the next couple of days: http://vedantmisra.com/2013/07/yusuke-endohs-amazing-quine-r...

I also made an EC2 AMI, ID ami-744b351d, for anyone who would like to try this themselves.

[jcromartie]

The code that generates the quine is included. There's still lots of super impressive stuff here, but don't be intimidated thinking he wrote that monster by hand!

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/code-gen...

[StavrosK]

Anyone care to explain how it works? I can see how the first step "Ruby -> X" is done, but what about "X -> Y"?

[lisper]

LOL! The codegen for Java is so much longer than any of the others!

[Leszek]

If anything, that makes it even more impressive.

[scott_karana]

Fantastic!

Same fellow who did the "rotating globe" quine a few years back:

http://mamememo.blogspot.ca/2010/09/qlobe.html

[mncaudill]

I wrote a post about how to do these multi-lingual quines a while back: https://nolancaudill.com/2011/01/01/how-to-build-a-quine/

[barbs]

Wow, even the source code of the original file is arranged to look like the Star of David surrounded by the dragon-eel thing, Obfuscated-C-contest style:

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

[jetru]

My thoughts went from "This is amazing" to "But he must have taken a lot of time and brainpower to do this" to "This is useless really" to "So what? If I wanted to do that I would take a year perhaps if I ever could" to "This is amazing"

[boomlinde]

As if in line with some sort of sick and twisted version of the Kübler-Ross model

[RyanZAG]

That is both the most incredible thing I've ever seen, yet also by far the saddest thing I've ever seen. Props to the author for taking dedication to a whole new level.

Link to a description of what this actually is: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

[dustingetz]

Its not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine generation[1], and the authors have a very popular talk where they livecode a quine generator; that is, they livecode a program that generates an infinite list of quines[2] (source code from talk [3]).

[1] http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-... [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren [3] https://github.com/webyrd/quines

The talk is amazing and hilarious.

On point, if the code is not generated in this fashion, there is assuredly a "work smart not hard" trick that drastically simplifies the problem.

[skrebbel]

If you think that anything about this is sad, then you simple don't love programming enough.

There's nothing wrong with not loving programming, but calling people who clearly do "sad" because of it, is a bit, well, sad.

[GuiA]

I'm sorry, how is that sad?

[kragen]

Saying that hacking is "sad" is arrogantly elevating your own limited worldview over the worldview of hackers. Perhaps someday you could hope to become as awesome as the person you're criticizing, but first you have to realize that being a hacker is something worth aspiring to.

[quchen]

In case someone is able to run this beast, I'd appreciate an upload of the intermediate source files.

[SilasX]

Working on it now. I started a repo where I document the things I had to do to get it to work, i.e. where I had to do something other than what was in Mame's README:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles

The intermediate source files I've been able to generate so far are in /output_files:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles/tree/master/output...

Edit: Direct link to the go file:

https://github.com/SilasX/QuineRelayFiles/blob/master/output...

Edit2: I ended up copying so much of what was already there that I re-did this as a fork, adding my contributions in two directories (installation and intermediate):

https://github.com/SilasX/quine-relay

So far I'm stuck at an issue with the Pascal compiler not accepting long strings, which can be fixed either with a compiler switch or by editing the source earlier in the relay.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/issues/3

[vedant]

I successfully compiled every intermediary, and posted all of the code in a gzipped tarball here: http://goo.gl/EBZFV.

I also made an EC2 AMI, ID ami-744b351d, for anyone who would like to try this themselves.

I started a tiny stub post here, where I'd like to dig into the code over the next couple of days: http://vedantmisra.com/2013/07/yusuke-endohs-amazing-quine-r...

I posted about it earlier in a reply here to OP.

[sker]

I made it to the first Fortran, 24 out of 50:

    gfortran -o QR QR.f && ./QR > QR.f90
    gfortran: internal compiler error: Killed (program f951)

Giving up now.

[sikhnerd]

I gave it a (very) quick go, but failed and I don't have neither the time nor skill to debug it, I'll throw up what got generated so far if you're interested. https://twitter.com/sikhnerd/status/356920512770867200

[mbillie1]

I'm grabbing the packages (in Ubuntu 12.04, just sub "clojure1.4" with "clojure" and you should be able to grab them all)... will attempt to run it once I get this all set up.

[shurcooL]

Yeah, I want to see the golang code.

[deathwarmedover]

here's my efforts so far on OS X Lion: https://gist.github.com/dwo/6004592

[NanoWar]

The miracle happens here: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/src/code-gen...

Also the SVG to ASCII mapping is cool!

[duggieawesome]

Yeah this is crazy. Just a taste, this is "Hello, world!" in Intercal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Hello.2C_world

[avivo]

This should be in MOMA.

[tome]

Why's there a Star of David in the middle?

[dpayne]

Here's another one of his projects where you can write ruby script using just underscores. https://github.com/mame/_

[_pmf_]

Day 5462 on the internet.

Today, I have seen true madness.

[codeulike]

NB: I originally posted this with the link pointing to the QR.rb file, which is the main code file and also a piece of Ascii art. Looks like the mods switched the link back to the main project to provide more context. But to have people looking at QR.rb first and then reading about what it does afterwards was the idea. Amazing piece of work by @hirekoke.

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb

[zw123456]

This reminds me very much of the various types of mathematical exercises that seem to be very esoteric and academic but turned out to be very useful in some solution in physics (eg. lorentz contractions). I would not be surprised if some insight indirectly comes from this insanely amazing exercise.

[GhotiFish]

It terrifies me what this insight might be.