I’ve been thinking about AI a bit lately, and a question I’ve had, is what is the smallest non trivial programming loop you could make? What number of opcodes would it be? I guess it’d have to be a program that took evolving inputs and iterated to approach an optimal solution.

I’m thinking of a program that has changing inputs, so that there is no one optimal solution, the best the program can do is constantly seek to a solution. It’s a thought experiment, in that that you can calculate an upper bound for how quickly a genetic program could evolve by working out the simplest non trivial program, and calculating how fast it could be run on a modern cpu.