This is a note about a mad science project I discovered, the works of a Japanese researcher who runs a single-person collective called Henyapente.
Why a collective? In Japan there’s a tradition of hobby interest groups called Doujin (同人 meaning “same people”).
A doujin is a group of people who share an interest, activity, or hobby.
The word is translated into English as clique, fandom, society, or circle (as in “sewing circle”). Self-published creative works produced by these groups are also called doujin, including manga, magazines, novels, music, anime, merch, and video games (“doujin soft”).
It originated as literary circles in the Meiji period (late 19th to early 20th century) of like-minded poets and novelists who self-published literary magazines, some of which are still active. Many modern Japanese writers came from such literary circles. After World War II, manga artists who make comics and graphic novels formed doujin groups as a way to cultivate young talent and as a channel for amateurs to enter the commercial market. This movement culminated in Comiket (“comic market”) of Tokyo, which is now a huge convention with a hundred thousand visitors. It’s famous for indie art, fan fiction, and super-niche zines.
Doujin conventions usually require applications to be submitted as a group, even for an artist to participate. Such single-person groups are called 個人サークル, “individual circle”, an organization of one. Henyapente is a research group created by an independent computer science researcher to publish their work online, and at conventions and conferences.
The research is delightfully weird, going back to a series of small operating systems written from scratch, including OS5 (the fifth self-made OS - the previous four were never finished) with various low-level programming experiments on BIOS, UEFI, bootloader, kernel. During this time an idea emerged of generating a 512-byte master boot record (MBR) through genetic algorithms; then later “cultivating” executable binaries in virtual ecosystems.
Binary Biology is the lecturer’s neologism that considers executable binaries as biological organisms. It involves evaluating and giving feedback on compiled binaries using systems, allowing them to evolve and develop desired functions like living organisms.
In this lecture, we introduce how small executable ELF binaries can be treated as single-celled organisms, and then use the experimental environment “daisy-tools” based on such binary biology concept to conduct experiments where small ELF executables acquire new functions through evolution. While still in a research stage lacking practical utility, this approach differs from traditional manual development methods, offering an opportunity to consider how executable binaries can autonomously evolve to gain functionality.
The above screenshot is from Daisy World, where species of cells live/die/multiply according to rules about ambient temperatures.
At one of the doujin events, he bought a Gameboy cartridge and a writer to flash the ROM. This inspired him because now he could write low-level programs to run directly on a physical machine. And it enabled him to distribute his programs as cartridges alongside books and zines with in-depth technical articles.
Gameboy is a popular platform with mature emulators, which let him experiment in quick iterations on a desktop computer. He started writing primitive “operating systems” or binary ecosystems, GUI, file system, hex editor.. And eventually developed a unique technique of generating machine language instructions using Bash shell scripts. Here’s an assembler that writes instructions for Gameboy’s Sharp LR35902 CPU. Later he used similar methods to write programs for PDP-7 and game consoles such as Mega Drive and Sega Saturn. He has published several doujin zines that document his approach.
The newest project is RPG-OS (RPG stands for “role-playing game”). It starts as a classic shell prompt interface, but the command SHOWINSIDE reveals the inner mechanism: a game world with characters that walk around and move symbols to perform computation. On the right side is system input, where every character comes in; on the left side is the shell application processing them. For the ECHO command, you can see an avatar carrying letters to system output.
One of his motivations has been to explore ways to “directly speak to the CPU and create executable binaries without using a programming language”. From writing machine code by hand, he arrived at the insight that as long as it can generate a sequence of bytes as instructions, the method can be anything: shell scripts, cellular automata, or a game-like user interface.
