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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Perl script wins transmediale software art award 7 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Crafty, yes ... elegant, yes. But nonetheless, why would anyone want such a program? I remember back in college playing hacking games and doing something similar with shell scripts:

    # shell script named foo
    foo&;foo&;

    To get rid of it and the 'bomb', just 'rm' the file. This program is a little more dangerous in that once you execute it, the code will be interpreted and removing the source file will not affect its execution (unless I've got that wrong).

    *sigh* - I dunno ... perhaps I'm in a

    • If you take the output from the program and turn it into a graphic, you get a sort of op- art dealie [generative.net] which is kinda nice. As generative art, it's really pretty elegant: it produces different "art" each time it runs, and it's a simple piece of code that has a lot of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Admittedly, as a piece of code that someone might idly run "to see what it does", it's a boxful of Denial of Service, and a few precautions might have been in order.

      In defense of the artist (and yes,
      • thanks for that although my name is on the paper you reference, i contributed ideas rather than words. to be honest, i can't grok that academic language either. the words you cite are largely Geoff's response to the fork bomb, who is neither a sysadmin or a programmer. i don't think this fork bomb encourages people to crash other peoples systems. it has a built in limitation and a warning, so on both counts it's less dangerous than the simple perl -e 'fork while 1' i didn't have one motivation for wri
        • oops, apologies for the lack of line breaks...

          it should have been

          thanks for that

          although my name is on the paper you reference, i contributed ideas rather than words. to be honest, i can't grok that academic language either. the words you cite are largely Geoff's response to the fork bomb, who is neither a sysadmin or a programmer.

          i don't think this fork bomb encourages people to crash other peoples systems. it has a built in limitation and a warning, so on both counts it's less dangerous than the simple perl -e 'fork while 1'

          i didn't have one motivation for writing this script, it's just a simple hack. it allows many points to be made around it (aka post creative rationalisaion ;), and i'm trying to make points in support of the artistic programmer and his/her environment.
          • Well, you've encouraged me to try to do a generative music program in Perl, so that's a positive effect, anyway. (I agree with you about the academic language -- but I bet it did score with the judges! :) )

              --- Joe M.
            • heh, Perl is the best medium for music that i've found so far... i've found it plenty fast enough for realtime composition too.
              what do you have in mind, Joe?
              • well, I've been doing Eno-style "true" ambient - what I think of as "combinatorial" ambient - by hand lately, and it's a bear to do it that way. A layered series of motives, which shift relative to one another over time, allowing different combinations to appear. A sort of follow-on to "Music for Airports".

                I'm working through the design of a virtual studio to experiment with this kind of composition. The idea is to be able to set up several sets of harmonically-related loops of different lengths, which, on
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