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Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming

Tom Wildenhain · 2.2M views · 2019-10-29 · 51:32

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Repeatedly recommended in best-talks threads as a fun, mind-blowing demonstration of unexpected computation.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Computability & complexity theoryUniversity lectures & coursesProgramming language design
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powerpointturing completenessesoteric languagescomputationcmu

What people said

gnatman · 2023-12 · Strong recommendation

"Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming" Tom Wildenham (2019) [VIDEO] Really fun, kinda blew my mind. Guy got a job at Microsoft shortly after giving this talk.

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gregsadetsky · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

I would also very highly recommend you watch this talk about PowerPoint’s Turing-completeness — [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!

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jjmarr · 2024-07 · Recommendation

[VIDEO] PowerPoint programming by Tom Wildenhain. He does not use VBA macros, just shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing Complete.

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Sources

Video by Tom Wildenhain, played through YouTube.

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