
On the Turing Completeness of MS PowerPoint [pdf] - gwern
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twildenh/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf
======
raoulj
The video accompanying this paper (recommend watching for a good laugh):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8)

~~~
JetSpiegel
Not that the paper lacks any chucklegoofs, but that video takes the cake.

------
watersb
Ig Nobel Prize in Computer Science

It is now clear that Scott McNealy's banishment of PowerPoint required the
creation of much less-capable systems, and thus to the demise of Sun.

------
tonmoy
Next step, emulate powerpoint within powerpoint

~~~
nom
imagine the number of clicks it will take :D

------
saurik
This is literally the twentieth (!!) time in less than two months that this
talk/paper has been submitted to Hacker News. The entire concept of this kind
of website (Hacker News / reddit / etc.) really needs some major innovation to
deal with this variability of response to content combined with repetition of
material over time due to the rotation of readers (which eventually leads
people to move to new communities of people with a different seed base of
"stuff already seen"; a problem I call "the cohort problem" and have given
talks about at times).

(There is also something weird going on where Algolia claims this specific
post appeared 19 hours ago while Hacker News itself claims it appeared only 3
hours ago. What's up with that?)

As mentioned in another comment, I will argue the video is a _much_ better way
to experience this, due to a combination of the humor of the presenter and
being able to watch it actually function. (After seeing it on Hacker News when
it was posted six or seven weeks ago, I showed this video to the first day of
a class I am teaching this quarter on the nature of programming languages.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016364)

~~~
gwern
> This is literally the twentieth (!!) time in less than two months that this
> talk/paper has been submitted to Hacker News.

It may be the twentieth time the talk has come up, but it's not for the paper;
I check my submissions with hn.algolia.com usually.

> (There is also something weird going on where Algolia claims this specific
> post appeared 19 hours ago while Hacker News itself claims it appeared only
> 3 hours ago. What's up with that?)

Algolia is counting my original submission last night, not the boosted
resubmission by dang or whichever HN mod decided to give it a second chance.

Personally, I didn't find the video better than the paper.

~~~
saurik
I maintain "talk/paper" as the talk video links to the paper; the opposite
happens to not be true, which is why it is so much more interesting to tell
people "there is also a video". FWIW, if your goal is just to link to
different landing pages or sub-representations of the same thing, we could
also submit the PowerPoint file itself. (I will also say that I guessed it was
moderators that made the bump but purposely didn't make that explicit. That to
me just underscores the need for a more fundamental fix to the way that
content appears, as it makes clear that the twentieth time posted this was
also just going to be do poorly again without manual intervention.)

~~~
lmitchell
I mean... for what it's worth, I'd never seen it before, I would never have
seen it without the manual intervention, and I loved it and think it's perfect
for HN. I don't think we really need a 'fundamental fix' for anything, seems
to be Working As Intended (tm) ;)

------
Animats
That's so Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft systems tended to execute
anything that came within range of an execution engine. This formed the basis
of many, many exploits. Gradually, they tightened up the defaults for AutoRun,
Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents. Then came PowerShell and a whole new
generation of exploits.

~~~
conistonwater
I think that's not what this particular case is about, see the video for a
demonstration of what the Turing machine looks like here. In particular, the
Turing machine progresses one state at a time, advanced by user clicks (!). It
uses AutoShapes and On Click Animations, the number of which depends on the
number of states and the number of tape cells.

~~~
Animats
Writing an exploit in that would be a real challenge.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Shh.

