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Lisp in Conway's Game of Life

posted by janrinok on Friday December 24 2021, @01:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the fun-for-the-holler-daze dept.

DannyB writes:

Lisp in Conway's Game of Life

Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life.

[...] The Lisp interpreter, written in C, is compiled to an assembly language for a CPU architecture implemented in the Game of Life, which is a modification of the computer used in the Quest For Tetris (QFT) project. The compilation is done using an extended version of ELVM (the Esoteric Language Virtual Machine). The Game of Life backend for ELVM was implemented by myself.

Generating a short enough Lisp interpreter assembly code and a Game of Life pattern that runs in a reasonable amount of time required a lot of effort.

Having an infinite size Game of Life grid [...] reduces the chances that any pattern will wrap around to the other side of the grid.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday December 24 2021, @03:17AM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday December 24 2021, @03:17AM (#1207526)

    It's a lisp interpreter running in a full machine emulation (compute + memory) hosted in a Conway's Game of Life instance.

    The lisp interpreter was written in C.

    The C compiler is ELVM. The ELVM backend (the part of the compiler targeting specific architectures - here, Conway's Game of Life) was written by the developer as well.

    Analogy: It's a Matryoshka doll factory building robots that build Lego bricks that you can use to build a Matryoshka doll factory. Or cars for the car analogy...

    And btw, I didn't need a second read to understand any of it so the author communicated the message just fine for the target audience.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Friday December 24 2021, @06:50AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Friday December 24 2021, @06:50AM (#1207556)

    Now run it in a redstone computer in Minecraft.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek