computation

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture. It was a short video for the Future Programming Workshop 2015.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Chaos Theory is a 64k demoscene intro by Conspiracy and CNS that took second place at Assembly 2006, generating its graphics and music from a tiny executable.

Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.

The first video in a series on extremely large numbers, introducing the topic with examples. Later parts go deep into the fast-growing hierarchy.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

The music video for Aphex Twin's T69 Collapse, directed by Weirdcore, with heavy strobing and glitchy audiovisual imagery. It is a track from the Collapse EP.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

mitxela shows his KiCad plugin that rounds PCB tracks to give circuit boards organic, melted-looking layouts instead of rigid geometric ones.

A Computerphile video in which Mark Jago of the University of Nottingham explains Turing's halting problem and how it led to the blueprint for the modern computer.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

A recapture in 50fps HD of Spaceballs' 'State of the Art', an Amiga demo released at The Party 1992. It showcases the Amiga's real-time animation, graphics and music in a few minutes.

John Conway talks in a short Numberphile interview about his mixed feelings toward the Game of Life, his most famous invention. He says he is not especially pleased that it overshadowed his other work.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

Viznut's third bytebeat video presents music generated by very short C programs and JavaScript expressions. It links to online tools and deeper analysis of one-line music.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

The official music video for A$AP Mob's Yamborghini High featuring Juicy J, known for heavy datamoshing and glitch effects with hue shifting.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

Pro Magic player Luis Scott-Vargas triggers a mandatory-action infinite loop on Magic Online, and the game stalls in a non-terminating state.

An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 demo of dual photography from Stanford, which swaps the roles of projector and camera to render a scene from the light's point of view. It includes the reveal of a hidden playing card.