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From: myrddin@iosys.net (Myrddin Emrys)
Subject: Re: Reproduction
Message-ID: <319c0519.81235131@tisXnews.thepoint.net>
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996 05:03:58 GMT
References: <4lit47$ekt@news.magi.com> <phvii6sd5y.fsf@destiny.mcs.anl.gov> <4n2pbo$2l4@news.euro.net> <ph91eyzzpz.fsf@destiny.mcs.anl.gov> <4n5958$8ha@Venus.mcs.com>
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We intercepted this transmission from jorn@MCS.COM (Jorn Barger):

:In article <ph91eyzzpz.fsf@destiny.mcs.anl.gov>,
:Gordon D. Pusch <pusch@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
:[...]
:>It would be very awkward in Ray's original instruction set; while it
:>can be shown to be computationally universal (i.e., it can be used to
:>simulate a Turing machine), it lacks instructions to move data from a
:>register to the soup, or vice versa --- it can only copy data from one
:>location in the soup to another. Hence, while one could easily write a
:>random-number generator in tierran, there is no simple way of writing
:>a random =cell=. However, a dodge that would accomplish =almost= the
:>same thing, would be to move data from a random address to the next
:>address in the ``daughter cell''...
:
:Random memory is not at all *random*.  A better hack would be to create
:a block of 256 bytes that contain the numbers 0-255, then retrieve
:one randomly.

Wouldn't that be a block of 32, not 255?

:(This takes me back to the good old days of 6502 coding for 64k machines.)
--
Myrddin Emrys                                 mailto:myrddin@iosys.net

