mov is Turing-complete
TL;DR — Four pages proving that a single x86 instruction is enough to compute anything. A joke with a real proof inside it.
Four pages. Dolan shows that the x86 mov instruction — just data movement, no arithmetic, no branching in the ordinary sense — is on its own Turing-complete, given memory and a single jump to loop.
It is funny and it is a genuine result: it collapses the intuition that an instruction set needs arithmetic and control flow as separate capabilities. It also spawned a real compiler (movfuscator) that emits programs consisting entirely of mov, which is useful for exactly the obfuscation purposes you would expect.
⚠️ Filed here partly as a correction: this document was initially misidentified in the wiki as Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail on the basis of filename and page count. It is not, and that is why identity is now verified from a PDF’s own first page.
Where this came from
4 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.