Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming
Tom Wildenhain4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2026
lecture · intermediate · evergreen · 2020–2026 on HN
Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.
Repeatedly recommended in best-talks threads as a fun, mind-blowing demonstration of unexpected computation.
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5 comments from Hacker News
"Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming" Tom Wildenham (2019) ▶ this video Really fun, kinda blew my mind. Guy got a job at Microsoft shortly after giving this talk.
I would also very highly recommend you watch this talk about PowerPoint’s Turing-completeness — ▶ this video It’s from the same person (Tom Wildenhain) as your video, but this is an hour long, there’s an actual audience (that’s supportive and spends most of the talk in disbelief), and the end with recursive slides / fractals is an absolute mind melt. Strong recommend! :) Thanks for the suggestions/reminder!
▶ this video PowerPoint programming by Tom Wildenhain. He does not use VBA macros, just shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing Complete.
I think this drives your point with incredible wit: “On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)” by Tom Wildenhain[1]. (5 minutes video) [1]: link (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) ▶ this video
Microsoft actually does a fairly good job with this. Here's a part of a talk that goes over a single feature in PowerPoint (a slide animation that morphs the contents of one slide into a different slide) and demonstrates how this feature interacts with the enormous existing PowerPoint feature set in interesting ways. ▶ this video It's obviously a stupid gimmicky feature but whatever team Microsoft put on it were clearly overachievers.