Construction Zone

This is still a work in progress. It may be changed in the future.

Construction Zone is a joke esoteric programming language (a Turing tarpit with humorous elements) based on an industrial complex in Scranton, New Jersey. The office is tasked with the construction of a zonohedron^[1].

computational model

Construction Zone is modeled after a warehouse and crew of roughly 1000 workers with at least 3 classes.

• Construction
• Operations
• Michael Scott
• Jim Halpert

The Scranton New Jersey industrial complex has an office and a warehouse. Michael Scott and the rest of the operations team (normally this would include Jim Halpert) operate on the right-most ~38 slots of the production line, while the regular construction workers (precisely 962) operate on the part of tape to the left of the office's slots.

962 of the ~1000 workers are construction workers the other ~38 are operations while one member of operations is Michael Scott. Memory is described as a thread, which is a string of an individual worker's output listed vertically. A worker is allowed to throw their thread away, not write one, or write one and remember; operations requiring knowledge of one's thread are only allowed by Michael Scott. Only Jim Halpert can correspond with other warehouses, which happens during a paper run operation.

memory constraints

A warehouse is only allotted 64,038,131 squares of paper and if approaching zero under a given configuration Jim Halpert (who works in the operations office) has to go get up to 64,038,129 pieces of paper from another warehouse.

Programs thus have a decrementing counter of pieces of paper. Operations team doesn't do construction so they can be sent a . symbol. If Jim Halpert's slot is the decimal point he has to get the amount of pieces of paper to the right of the decimal point in the string. Any of the operations team are allowed to throw away sums of pieces of paper from the stack as per an instruction from Michael Scott.

daily operation

Each day each member of the project team sits at the same chair and who's instructions are the programming language for the successful output of a sequence of binary strings which construct a zonohedron and exhaust a homotopy-type theoretical proof of "Z is Diophantine in Q"^[2] which halts construction at Dehn invariant 0.

halting conditions

explicit halting condition are:

• the warehouse runs out of paper
• the counter reaches 0* (where if it is the last piece of paper Michael Scott flips it and writes 0*)
• A zonohredon is constructed with an exhaustive proof of Dehn invariant 0.

initial configuration

Initial config follows the basic rule:

• A crew of 1000 workers writes a string of 1000 zeroes on day 1

A configuration period begins a construction project which is filed to day 0, which is itself a string that grows whenever day 0 elements are left at the end of the day. Generally day 0 starts as the single integer 0 and day 1 rewrites 0 to 1. Every subsequent day ends by submitting a single digit integer for compilation to the day's string. This is the initial configuration. Only Michael Scott will see the number of papers left and he copies the 0 from the initial configuration to the back of this piece of paper.

64038131
0

This outputs (after Michael Scott's day 0 instruction)

64038130
0

normal threading

The is one other basic rule for a construction project:

• On at least one of the given days a crew will write a string of alternating zeroes and ones (e.g 010101...)

At some point in the project there is a day which represents a string of alternating zeroes and ones. 0 day elements record this day with a flip rule (if nonzero write 0 if 0 write 1) and can be computed in parallel by Michael Scott. Because the flip day is recorded with a wildcard (such as an asterisk*) this thread can be used as a Post normal system in Michael Scott's memory thread.

e.g.

0|64038130
1|1

commands

There are thirteen symbols

| 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . *

• | separates a thread from the day's process
• 0-9 are straightforward
• . sends Jim Halpert on a paper run after his daily submission.
• * is a wildcard that supports Michael Scott's thread.

Completeness theorem

For Construction Zone to be "Michael Scott-complete" it solves the Collatz conjecture for a given finite field and encodes the solutions into the other initial configurations. Michael Scott can just utilize the main memory thread which is Turing-complete without requiring exhaustive construction proofing.

See also

Grill Tag