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A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)

118 points| peebz | 3 years ago |woodrush.github.io

25 comments

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singularity2001|3 years ago

Youtube: 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?

dang|3 years ago

Discussed at the time:

A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661616 - Dec 2021 (85 comments)

jart|3 years ago

Also related by the same author:

Show HN: LambdaLisp – A Lisp interpreter that runs on lambda calculus - 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!

deterministic|3 years ago

This is super cool. The levels of abstraction needed to do this makes my geek brain explode. In a good way :)

aradox66|3 years ago

The next step is clearly to run emacs on this puppy

mftb|3 years 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.

balnaphone|3 years ago

This is awesome, and well deserves all the accolades it's received!

jxy|3 years ago

But will it run Doom?

buggythebug|3 years ago

Enough...with...lisp....

sph|3 years ago

3 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.

ashton314|3 years ago

Fine, fine. We can do ISWIM next time.