Archive for March 21st, 2025

March 21, 2025

Malbolge

Esoteric programming language

Malbolge [mahl-bol-jeh] is a public domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno, the Malebolge. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive ‘crazy operation,’ base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code. It builds on the difficulty of earlier challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge) but exaggerates this aspect to an extreme degree, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible to write useful Malbolge programs, though the author himself has never written one.

The first program was not written by a human being; it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp. Later, Lou Scheffer posted a cryptanalysis of Malbolge and provided a program to copy its input to its output. He also saved the original interpreter and specification after the original site stopped functioning and offered a general strategy of writing programs in Malbolge as well as some thoughts on its Turing completeness.

Tags: