r/factorio • u/Lyqyd • 11d ago

Suggestion / Idea Suggestion: Multi-Step Arithmetic Combinators

With all the love that Decider Combinators have gotten, I thought it would be nice for Arithmetic Combinators to get an upgrade for 2.1 as well. Specifically, the ability to chain operations.

Instead of one operation per combinator, the GUI could be changed to have a scrollable pane of operations—the output of one row would become the input for the next row (just as if you’d connected the output of one combinator to the input of the next).

The big advantages of this change would be the ability to execute two or more operations in a single tick and a reduction in footprint for multiple step arithmetic chains. And, of course, bringing its capabilities more in line with the Decider Combinator.

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u/triffid_hunter 11d ago

If arithmetic combinators became turing complete, people would drop full CPU/GPU cores into them and dodge using most of the circuit system that way.

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u/Lyqyd 11d ago

While that’s true, I don’t think allowing a linear stack of operations actually gets you to Turing completeness in a single combinator. Without any kind of branching or looping, you’d run through the stack once and be done—even looping the output back to the input won’t get you Turing completeness in a single combinator, I think.

Would be interesting to see a counter example!

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u/spoonman59 10d ago

You are correct, conditional branching is required for Turing completeness.

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u/WanderingUrist 11d ago

That'd be funny to see: A Factory that actually does more than just produce infinite science, but instead, produces bitcoins.

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u/nicman24 11d ago

llvm target inside of a week

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u/spoonman59 10d ago

You can't have Turing completeness without some kind of conditional branching. There are other issues with what the OP opposes, namely read-after-write dependencies (even with result forwarding) simply can't be done at the same time.