[HN Gopher] A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of L...
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       A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
        
       Author : peebz
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2023-01-05 20:42 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (woodrush.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (woodrush.github.io)
        
       | singularity2001 wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | OscarCunningham wrote:
         | We talked about this a bit here:
         | 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 wrote:
           | An entire forum dedicated to the Game of Life? That's pretty
           | cool.
        
       | jxy wrote:
       | But will it run Doom?
        
       | aradox66 wrote:
       | The next step is clearly to run emacs on this puppy
        
       | buggythebug wrote:
       | Enough...with...lisp....
        
         | ashton314 wrote:
         | Fine, fine. We can do ISWIM next time.
        
         | agency wrote:
         | never!
        
         | sph wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | anthk wrote:
           | Emacs and HN for GNU's, right?
        
       | deterministic wrote:
       | This is super cool. The levels of abstraction needed to do this
       | makes my geek brain explode. In a good way :)
        
       | mftb wrote:
       | > 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.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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!
        
           | Y_Y wrote:
           | I would apply the same warrior poet accolade to whoever made
           | Cosmopolitan libc and that wonderful emulator+debugger combo
           | called Blink(enlights) that was posted recently.
        
             | dflock wrote:
             | The astonishing Justine Tunney: https://github.com/jart
        
       | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-07 23:01 UTC)