What is MS Fool for $1000, Alex?

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There is a recurring insider reference among Very Serious Computer Users regarding using Microsoft products to perform sophisticated computational tasks [1]. While most people tend to think of these programs as not computationally sophisticated, programs such as Excel [2], PowerPoint [3], and even MS Paint can do some pretty powerful computing. One such example are 3-D Models enabled by object/shape manipulation in PowerPoint and Paint.

Around every April 1, Carnegie Mellon University students participate in an annual tongue-in-cheek conference (sponsored by the satirical Association for Computational Heresy) called SIGBOVIK (Special Interest Group on Harry Questionable Bovik). Not sure what where Harry Q. Bovik got his credentials, but if you enjoy the Ig Nobel Awards, this should be right up your alley.

SIGBOVIK often features highly interesting quasi-research [4] projects based on the aforementioned Microsoft program suite. But there are other groups creating programs and computational artifacts because they can. Here are a few examples of this collected from around the web:

1) Using MS Paint to create high-quality works of art, courtesy of Hal Lasko and "The Pixel Painter".

2) Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2017 lecture on Turing-complete Power Point.

The (non-) Turing Completeness of PowerPoint. One of many computational artifacts that are Turing incomplete. COURTESY: Tom Wildenhain YouTube channel and HackerNoon.

3) Try out this version of Doom programmed in Excel, courtesy of Gamasutra. The game program runs on a series of equations that requires VBA to run. There are several files you need to download, and the blogpost goes through the full set of challenges.

Rasterized Graphics with Underlying Linear Equations [5]. Examples from the Excel Art Series. ARTIST: Oleksiy Say

4) The final example returns us to SIGBOVIK (2016), where David Fouhey and Daniel Maturana bring us ExcelNet. This is an architecture for Deep Learning in Excel, and has gone through the paces of the Kaggle MNIST competition. Another example features Blake West and his implementation of a deep learning architecture in Google Sheets.

NOTES:
[1] This is similar to advertising membership in the cult of LaTeX, touched upon in this discussion of LaTeX fetishes.

[2] the first spreadsheet (Autoplan) was developed in the form of a scripting language, which is a more general version of more formal programming languages (e.g. Java versus Javascript).

[3] presentation software can be pretty diverse. But is any of it Turing Complete (TC)? If you work out your design process using Wang Dominoes, then perhaps TC-ness can be realized.

Example of a Wang tile.

[4] definition of quasi-research: research projects that do not produce useful results directly, but often as a side-effects of the research process itself.

[5] by combining the world of image rasterization with interlinked linear equations, there are some exciting (but conceptually and technlogically undeveloped) opportunities in this space.

Be as Brief as Possible but no Briefer

Nature Highlights article on the Journal of Brief Ideas, which itself is brief.

No, this is not an Einstein quote. But Einstein very well may have submitted to the Journal of Brief Ideas [1], an open access version of Occam's razor. I just submitted a brief paper called "Playing Games with Ideas: when epistemology pays off", which is the equivalent of a fully-indexed abstract [2]. While some people might find 200 words to be too brief, the Journal allows for attachments to be submitted, thus allowing a bit of circumventing with regard to the word limit [3].

According to the Journal FAQ, submitting such brief reports is part of establishing something below the current standard for the minimal publishable unit. It is also important for enforcing good scientific citizenship practices [4]. Very short papers have occasionally been published in regular journals. Mathematics papers by Lander and Parkin [5] and Conway and Soifer [6] accomplished mathematical proofs in less than a paragraph (but with multiple figures). Other than these rather mythical examples, it is quite the challenge to integrate a well-formulated idea into the Journal of Brief Ideas' 200 word limit.


NOTES:
[1] Woolston, C. (2015). Journal publishes 200-word papers. Nature, 518, 277.

[2] Indexing done via document object identification on Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.167647

[3] If a picture is worth 1000 words, then the Journal of Brief Ideas become less brief than its name implies.

[4] Neisseria (2015). All you need to publish in this journal is an idea. Science Made Easy blog, February 13.

[4] Lander, L.J. and Parkin, T.R. (1966). Counterexample to Euler's Conjecture on sums of like powers. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 72(6), 1079.

[5] Conway, J.H. and Soifer, A. (2004). Can n² + 1 unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side > n, say n + ɛ? American Mathematical Monthly, 1.