Accidentally Turing-complete

They are probably best considered as a subset of “discovered” or “found” esoteric programming languages (esolangs). So FRACTRAN⁠, as extraordinarily minimalist as it is, does not count; nor would a deliberately obfuscated language like Malbolge (where it took years to write a trivial program & an interpreter was only solved in 2020) count because it was designed to be an esolang; but neither would Conway’s Game of Life count because questions about whether it was TC appeared almost immediately upon publication and being able to program Tetris in it is not surprising, and given the complexity of packet-switching Ethernet networks & routers it’s not necessarily too surprising if one can build a cellular automaton into them or encode logical circuits⁠, or if airplane ticket planning/​validation is not just NP-hard or EXPSPACE-hard but undecidable (because of the complex rules airlines require). Many configuration or special-purpose languages or tools or complicated games turn out to violate the Rule of least power & be “accidentally Turing-complete”⁠, like Sendmail¹⁠, MediaWiki templates⁠, sed or repeated regexp / find-replace commands in an editor (any form of string substitution or templating or compile-time computation is highly likely to be TC on its own or when iterated since they often turn out to support a lambda calculus or a term-rewriting language or tag system eg. esolangs “ /  /  /  ” or Thue), XSLT⁠, Infinite Minesweeper⁠, Dwarf Fortress²⁠, Starcraft, Minecraft⁠, Ant⁠, Transport Tycoon & Cities: Skyline⁠, C++ templates & Java generics⁠, RNA⁠/​DNA computing etc are TC but these are not surprising either: many games support scripting (ie. TC-ness) to make their development easier and enable fan modifications, so games’ TC may be as simple as including syntax for calling out to a better-known language like Perl (which can’t even be parsed without undecidability coming up), or it may just be an obscure part of a standard format (most people these days are probably unaware that TrueType & many fonts are PostScript programs based on stack machines, similar to DWARF debugging and ELF metadata⁠, or that some music formats go beyond MIDI in providing scripting capabilities and must be interpreted to be displayed; once one knows this, then fonts being TC are no more surprising than T_eX documents being TC, leading of course, to many severe & fascinating font or media security vulnerabilities such as the BLEND vulnerability or SNES & NES code exploiting Linux systems⁠. Other formats, like PDF, are simply appalling.³). Similarly, such feats as creating a small Turing machine using Legos or dominos⁴ would not count, since we already know that mechanical computers work. It may be somewhat surprising that the Z3 electromechanical computer is Turing-complete given that it could only “execute fixed sequences of of floating-point arithmetical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square roots)”—but with all those operations, the camel’s nose is in the tent.

On the other hand, “weird machines” are a fertile ground of “that’s TC?” reactions.

Surprisingly Turing-complete

Many cases of discovering TC seem to consist of simply noticing that a primitive in a system is a little too powerful/​flexible. For example, if Boolean logic can be implemented, that’s a sign that more may be possible and turn Boolean circuits into full-blown circuit logic for a TM. Substitutions, definitions/​abbreviations, regular expressions (especially with any extensions or custom features), or any other kind of ‘search and replace’ functionality is another red flag (eg. Notepad++ Turing machines), as they suggest that a cellular automaton or tag system is lurking. This applies to anything which can change state based on ‘neighbors’, like a spreadsheet cell or a pixel. Any sort of scripting interface or API, even if locked down, may not be locked down quite enough. An actual scripting language or VM is so blatant as to be boring when (not if) someone finds a vulnerability or escape from the sandbox. Operations which take variable lengths of times or whose completion can’t easily be predicted from the start are another source of primitives, as they may ‘depend’ on the data they are operating over in some way, implementing different operations on different data, which may mean that they can be made equivalent to Boolean conditionals based on a careful encoding of data.

What is “surprising” may differ from person to person. Here is a list of accidentally-Turing-complete systems that I found surprising:

• Peano arithmetic: addition & multiplication on natural numbers is enough to be TC; in contrast, Presburger arithmetic removes multiplication and hence is not TC

• Wang tiles: multi-colored squares, whose placement is governed by the rule that adjacent colors must be the same (historically, not surprising to Wang, but was surprising to me and I think to a lot of other people)

• X86 shenanigans:

  • MMU shuffle computer RAM around to make programming easier; if a program sets up its share of memory properly, it can execute arbitrary computations via MMU page-faults (comments⁠; paper) without ever running code itself by turning the MMU faulting mechanism into a one-instruction set computer⁠.
  • mov: “mov is Turing-complete”: the apparently innocuous x86 assembler instruction mov⁠, which copies data between the CPU & RAM, can be used to implement a transport-triggered-architecture one instruction set computer⁠, allowing for playing Doom (and for bonus points, it can be done using xor too—there are many such TC one-instruction set computers, such as ByteByteJump)
  • register-less X86: “x86 is Turing-complete with no registers”

• return-to-libc attack: software libraries provide pre-packaged functions, each of which is intended to do one useful thing; a fully TC ‘language’ can be cobbled out of just calls to these functions and nothing else, which enables evasion of security mechanisms since the attacker is not running any recognizable code of his own.

  See, among many others, “The Geometry of Innocent Flesh on the Bone: Return-into-libc without Function Calls (on the x86)” & “On the Expressiveness of Return-into-libc Attacks”⁠.

• Pokemon Yellow: underflows/​overflows of various kinds and limited reprogramming of game RAM are primitives used in many speedruns⁠, but can be taken much further than simply warping forward in the game (like in Super Mario Bros 3).

  In the “Pokemon Yellow Total Control Hack” outlines an exploit of a memory corruption attack which allows one to write arbitrary Game Boy assembler programs by repeated in-game walking and item purchasing. (There are similar feats which have been developed by speedrun aficionados, but I tend to ignore most of them as they are ‘impure’: for example, one can turn the SNES Super Mario World into an arbitrary game like Snake or Pong or Flappy Bird but you need the new programs loaded up into extra hardware like controllers, so in my opinion, it’s not really showing SMW to be unexpectedly TC and is different from the other examples. Similarly, one can go from Super Game Boy to SNES to arbitrary code like IRC⁠. This distinction is debatable.)

  • a similar memory corruption issue surfaces in POSIX printf’s %n option, among other C library functions (Carlini et al 2015); hence, “printbf—Brainfuck interpreter in printf”
  • A StarCraft 1 buffer overflow was used by the SC community to implement complicated maps, tower defense games, and Super Mario (with level editor); emulating the hack to avoid breaking the mods in updated SC versions caused Blizzard quite a bit of trouble.

• Braid: TC

• Baba Is You: TC via a CA construction

• Recursed: TC

• a 3D chess with check rules can apparently be made TC: Dempsey et al 2019

• Doom: monster movements through the map can implement logical circuits and thus Doom level maps are TC

• musical notation: given instructions for transposing successive notes, musical notation becomes the esolang Choon

• heart cells: interact in a way allowing logic gates and hence TC (perhaps not too surprising since cellular automatons were biologically motivated?)

• SVG: PostScript is TC by design, yes, but what about the more recent vector graphics image format, SVG⁠, which is written as XML⁠, a (usually) not-TC document language?

  Turns out SVG allows a slow encoding of Rule 110 (and SVG files can be made arbitrarily large) and so SVG is as TC as anything else.

  If that’s not enough, the SVG standard is large and occasionally horrifying: the (failed) SVG 1.2 standard tried to add to SVG images the ability to open raw network sockets⁠. (Random sidenote: did you know GNOME Calculator has HTTPS support—to fetch currency exchange rate information from the ECB & IMF?)

• JBIG2 image compression operations: bit-twiddling operations meant for efficiently encoding sub-image variations can be rewritten to be null-ops on other parts, and a virtual machine built up out of sequences of compression operations; an additional memory overflow bug let this weird machine be weaponized to hack dissidents.

• user-driven game mechanics: one category of weird machines doesn’t quite count since they require an assumption along the lines of the user mechanically clicking or making the only possible choice in order to drive the system into its next step; while the user provides no logical or computational power in the process, they aren’t as satisfying examples for this reason:

  • Magic: the Gathering: not just TC⁵⁠, but above arithmetic in the hierarchy
  • CSS: was designed to be a declarative markup language for tweaking the visual appearance of HTML pages, but CSS can encode logic gates⁠, and CSS declarations interact just enough to allow an encoding of the cellular automaton Rule 110⁠, under the assumption of mechanical mouse clicks on the web browser to advance state (CSS hacks honorable mention: Kevin Kuchta’s “CSS-Only Chat”⁠, which uses no JS by outsourcing computation to the server)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint animations (excluding macros⁠, VBScript etc) can implement a Turing machine when linked appropriately (Wildenhain 2017⁠; video⁠; PPT), under the assumption of a user clicking on the only active animation triggers
  • JPEG XL includes powerful compression features which can implement fractals or cellular automatons, like Rule 110 in 50 bytes; unfortunately, to enable parallel decoding, JPEG XL appears to chunk images into squares which have a maximum size of 1024px, so what can be computed by any CA is severely limited.

Possibly accidentally or surprisingly Turing-complete systems:

• CSS without mouse clicks? Perhaps some sort of Wang tile using reflections and conditionals?

• Unicode? Nicolas Seriot suggests that Unicode’s bidirectional algorithms (intended for displaying scripts like Arabic or Hebrew which go right-to-left rather than left-to-right like English) may be complex enough to support a tag system via case folding rules (eg. Turkish).

  • Fonts themselves? Font rendering systems also support glyph substitution rules which are suspiciously close to tag systems and allow for tricks like solving Fizz Buzz or rendering sparklines⁠, although some implementations may not allow recursion and others have hardcoded depth limits. The most impressive use so far is “Fontemon: World’s first video game in a font!” (a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure text game).

• Human optical illusions? Changizi 2008 presents ambiguous images in a circuit-like format, whose depth perception ‘flips’ based on the ‘input’ or top of the circuit, which are analogous to OR/​AND/​NOT/​XOR computations; the existence of these ‘visual circuits’ hints at the possibility of ‘TC-complete’ images (although many pieces, like a working memory⁠, are missing)

Security implications

It turns out that given even a little control over input into something which transforms input to output, one can typically leverage that control into full-blown TC. This matters because, if one is clever, it provides an escape hatch from a system which is small, predictable, controllable, and secure, to one which could do anything. It’s hard enough to make a program do what it’s supposed to do without giving anyone in the world the ability to insert another program into your program. Even if there is no way to outright ‘escape’ the sandbox, such hidden programs can be dangerous, by extracting information about the surrounding program (eg. JS embedded in a web page which can extract your passwords by using Row hammer to attack your hardware directly, even if it can’t actually escape your web browser), or can take the host into strange & uncharted (and untested) territories.

That we find these demonstrations surprising is itself a demonstration of our lack of imagination and understanding of computers, computer security, and AI. We pretend that we are running programs on these simple abstract machines which do what we intuitively expect, but they run on computers which are bizarre, and our programs themselves turn out to be computers which are even more bizarre. Secure systems have to be built by construction; once the genie has been let out of the lamp, it’s difficult to patch the lamp.

An active area of research is into languages & systems carefully designed and proven to not be TC (eg. total functional programming). Why this effort to make a language in which many programs can’t be written? Because TC is intimately tied to Godel’s incompleteness theorems & Rice’s theorem⁠, allowing TC means that one is forfeiting all sorts of provability properties: in a non-TC language, one may be able to easily prove all sorts of useful things to know; for example, that programs terminate, that they are type-safe or not, that they can be easily converted into a logical theorem, that they consume a bounded amount of resources, that one implementation of a protocol is correct or equivalent to another implementation, that there are a lack of side-effects and a program can be transformed into a logically-equivalent but faster version (particularly important for declarative languages like SQL where the query optimizer being able to transform queries is key to acceptable performance, but of course one can do a surprising amount in SQL like 3D raytracing gradient descent for fitting machine learning models and some SQL extensions make it TC anyway by allowing either a cyclic tag system to be encoded, the model DSL⁠, or to call out to PL / SQL) etc.

Languages or systems which unintentionally cross over the line into being TC can be amusing or useful (although usually not), but they also have some serious implications: such systems, because they were never expected to be programmable, can be harmful, or extremely insecure & a cracker’s delight, as exemplified by the “language-theoretic security” paradigm, based on exploiting “weird machines”⁠; some of the literature:

• “Exploit Programming: From Buffer Overflows to ‘Weird Machines’ and Theory of Computation”⁠, Bratus et al 2011
• “The Halting Problems of Network Stack Insecurity”⁠, Sassaman et al 2011
• “The Page-Fault Weird Machine: Lessons in Instruction-less Computation”⁠, Bangert et al 2013
• “‘Weird Machines’ in ELF: A Spotlight on the Underappreciated Metadata”⁠, Shapiro et al 2013
• “Interrupt-oriented Bugdoor Programming: A minimalist approach to bugdooring embedded systems firmware”⁠, Tan et al 2014
• “The Weird Machines in Proof-Carrying Code”⁠, Vanegue 2014
• “Framing Signals—A Return to Portable Shellcode”⁠, Bosman & Bos 2014
• “The Seven Turrets of Babel: A Taxonomy of LangSec Errors and How to Expunge Them”⁠, Mormot et al 2016
• “Weird machines, exploitability, and provable unexploitability”⁠, Dullien 2017
• “Psychic Paper”⁠, Siguza 2020
• “Intrinsic Propensity for Vulnerability in Computers? Arbitrary Code Execution in the [Minsky 1960] Universal Turing Machine”⁠, Johnson 2021

Most recently, Spectre & generalizations (Mcilroy et al 2019) can be interpreted as providing a whole ‘shadow computer’ in the CPU via speculative execution which can be programmed to do things like run malware without visibly executing any of the malware instructions while having side-effects in the real computer. Spectre is interesting in being a class of vulnerabilities which have existed for decades in CPU architectures that were closely scrutinized for security problems, but just sort of fell into a collective human blind spot. Nobody thought of controllable speculative execution as being a ‘computer’ which could be ‘programmed’. Once someone noticed, because it was a powerful computer and of course TC, it could be used in many ways to attack stuff.

“Too powerful” languages can also manifest as nasty DoS attacks; the fuzz tester afl found that it could create an infinite loop in OpenBSD’s roff document formatting tool (first version, 43 years prior) by abusing some of the string substitution rules.

See Also

• Reservoir computing
• Inner-platform effect

External Links

• Discussion: HN: 1⁠, 2⁠, 3⁠; MeFi

• Accidentally Quadratic

• “Coding Machines”⁠; “Reflections on Trusting Trust”⁠, Thompson 1984 on compiler backdoors

• “It’s possible to build a Turing machine within Magic: The Gathering: Just arrange a series of cascading triggers so players no longer have any choice”

• “Two New Tools that Tame the Treachery of Files”

• “Your configs suck? Try a real programming language”

• “‘Life’ in Life”⁠, Phillip Bradbury 2012

• “Linux in a Pixel Shader—A RISC-V Emulator for VR Chat” (video)

• Biology:

  • “On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems”⁠, Baluška & Levin 2016
  • “Slime mould processors, logic gates and sensors”⁠, Adamatzky 2015/​Sensing and Computing with Slime Mould⁠, ed Adamatzky 2016; “Brainless but Multi-Headed: Decision Making by the Acellular Slime Mould Physarum polycephalum”⁠, Beekman & Latty 2015
  • “Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate”⁠, Gunji et al 2012

Appendix