5 ms·
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
- jxy 4y agoBut will it run Doom?
- postalrat 4y agoYes
- deterministic 4y agoThis is super cool. The levels of abstraction needed to do this makes my geek brain explode. In a good way :)
- dang 4y agoDiscussed at the time: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661616 - Dec 2021 (85 comments)
- jart 4y agoAlso related by the same author: Show HN: LambdaLisp – A Lisp interpreter that runs on lambda calculus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879848 Woodrush's projects are stunning. Like the warrior poet he's a hacker in the classical sense. Everything he builds just makes me think, wow, I can't believe something this cool actually exists. For example, he build a LISP engine for a 512 Byte Blc lambda calculus I wrote. I thought my own work was mostly educational, the sort of virtual machine that would never interpret more than small learning exercises but then woodrush comes along, hands me a giant binary blob of lambdas for me to feed into its standard input, and suddenly, I have LISP REPL in my terminal! One thing that's easy to miss though, in this blog posts, is just how well the stuff he builds actually works too. Normally with hobby projects like these, you'd expect to see more bugs when it's initially announced, or at least some pain getting the thing to work. But not with woodrush. His stuff always works so perfectly that it makes life difficult on discussion boards, since the only response that comes to mind is: wow!
- buggythebug 4y agoEnough...with...lisp....
- ashton314 4y agoFine, fine. We can do ISWIM next time.
- agency 4y agonever!
- sph 4y ago3 months ago you described yourself as a "non-techie", and you come here of all places, and cry about too much Lisp? You've taken a wrong turn, pal. This house was built with parens. Sent from my Lisp Machine.
- anthk 4y agoEmacs and HN for GNU's, right?
- benj111 4y ago>This house was built with parens. While the metaphor is correct. (House(kitchen ( bathroom (bedroom)))) Surely the meaningful part of a house, or lisp, is everything else. (((()))) Is neither a house nor lisp. Yes it probably is, but the meaningful part is the nothing that's in there, not the parens surrounding the nothing. A house isn't just 4 walls. It's where you live, surely that's the important part. I'll stop getting philosophical with throwaway comments now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tmtvl 4y agoI like that analogy, a programming language without brackets is like a house without walls, and nil is an empty house.
- aradox66 4y agoThe next step is clearly to run emacs on this puppy
- mftb 4y ago> Generating a small enough pattern that runs in a reasonable amount of time required a lot of effort. lol. Programming skills and expert-level understatement. Nice. This is a cool thing.
- singularity2001 4y agoYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foAJTAu_gyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foAJTAu_gyE It looks like this approach uses display bits to do calculations!? Maybe it's nice for debugging, but using these cells seems pretty inefficient!? Couldn't the pipelines and many of the logic cells be implemented in a much more direct way in GoL?
- OscarCunningham 4y agoWe talked about this a bit here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5503 https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5503. I estimated that the pattern is about 20000 times larger than it needs to be.
- sph 4y agoAn entire forum dedicated to the Game of Life? That's pretty cool.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- balnaphone 4y agoThis is awesome, and well deserves all the accolades it's received!