RE: [-empyre-] tangent: software / conceptual art

[Paul Brown <paul@paul-brown.com>]

> But this is false. See for instance
> http://www.fact-index.com/s/se/self_modifying_code.html . The technical term
> is 'self-modifying code'.

Self modifying code was a popular strategy of the early (pre Dewdney
and Redcode) Code Wars.  Competing programs would rewrite their own
code and some could steal and adapt their opponents code.  Code Wars
began in the 60's and was an early pre-cursor of alife (and viruses).
This was about the same time that Holland published his papers on
adaptive strategies (in 1962) - the root of today's evolutionary and
genetic algorithms and a major taproot of alife.

I worked as an assembler programmer in the 1970's and self-modifying
code was popular.  It made efficient use of the small memory spaces -
some of the systems I worked on only had 4K of memory - and was also
pretty time efficient too.

If anyone is interested to learn what working with these kind of
systems was like there's a fascinating (well, for me anyway) faq at:

  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-3.html

In an early post I referred to Ihnatowicz's Senster.  This was run
on a clone of a Honeywell Series 16.  The codeset that Ihnatowicz used
to implement the Senster is here:

  http://www.series16.adrianwise.co.uk/programming.html

The CACHe project in London have recently discovered a complete listing
of the Senster code and it's now online here:

  http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/senster/senstersoftware/index.html

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Paul Brown          PO Box 413, Cotton Tree QLD 4558, Australia
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