[HN Gopher] John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprising...
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John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep
language (2020)
Author : warrenm
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-05-16 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (raganwald.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (raganwald.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| TIL John Conway died during the COVID pandemic. I'm as shocked as
| someone who just discovered John Lennon was killed. :(
| gfody wrote:
| I think the world has yet to feel the weight of this great man's
| contributions. the monstrous moonshines and the freewill theorem
| seem mind blowing and not very well known at all.
| peterderivaz wrote:
| Project Euler challenge involving Fractran:
| https://projecteuler.net/problem=308
| breck wrote:
| He mentions a CD-ROM version of Society of Mind
| (https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/Voyager.html). I had never
| heard of it. Does anyone know if the video content from that CD-
| ROM is available online?
| rootbear wrote:
| There is a link what appears to be part one in the article.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hx8RixhoOM
| jonahx wrote:
| A FRACTRAN interpreter in FRACTRAN, in 24 fractions:
|
| https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/246682/15469
| VHRanger wrote:
| Thanks, the fact that FRACTRAN didnt bootstrap its own
| interpreter was the reason I didnt use the language seriously
| for programming!
| [deleted]
| siraben wrote:
| A few years ago, I wrote a compiler for FRACTRAN written in
| Haskell[0] (translated from Common Lisp) with an associated blog
| post[1]. Using the tagless-final style you can write a simple
| program like this: sumTo :: FracComp repr =>
| Integer -> [repr [Rational]] sumTo n = [addi "c" 0, addi
| "n" n, while (jge "n" 0) [adds "c" "n", subi "n" 1]]
|
| And the compiler would output this: l>
| runAssembler (sumTo 10) -- Program length:
| 31 Right [847425747 % 2,13 % 3,19 % 13,11 % 3,11 % 29,31 %
| 11,41 % 31,23 % 11,23 % 47,2279 % 23,59 % 301,59 % 41,67 %
| 413,329 % 67,61 % 59,73 % 61,83 % 73,71 % 61,71 % 97,445 %
| 71,707 % 89,103 % 5353,103 % 83,109 % 5459,5141 % 109,107 %
| 103,113 % 749,113 % 19,131 % 113,29 % 131,127 % 113]
| l> runAsm (sumTo 10) [(Prime 97,55),(Prime 107,1)]
|
| [0] https://github.com/siraben/hasktran
|
| [1] https://siraben.dev/2020/02/26/translating_cl.html
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| I miss raganwald, I loved it when their posts and comments were
| blowing up HN.
| bmacho wrote:
| Very long article, and IMO it doesn't justify the "surprisingly
| deep" claim. Disappointing. Can I have my time back?
|
| tl;dr: a 'usage' of fractran is that fratcran programs are
| collatz-like sequences, thus, the behaviour of collatz-like
| sequences is undecidable.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| See also: "Building Fizzbuzz in Fractran from the Bottom Up
| (2016)" [0]
|
| I'll repost my comment from that thread:
|
| >For some reason this makes me imagine an alternate history sci-
| fi universe where Pythagoras (famous for his love of fractions)
| invents FRACTRAN. Then Archimedes builds a mechanical computer to
| execute those programs, and one of the successors of Alexander
| The Great puts the computer to use in warfare and conquers the
| world. Science is accelerated so that nuclear physics are
| invented by the time Jesus is born...
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448283
| jfoutz wrote:
| I played a lot of the original civ as a kid. I'd be super
| disappointed if I didn't get railroads before 0. rush pyramids,
| democracy, tons of tiny self supporting towns. That game didn't
| really offer a way to convert other cities and towns sort of
| invasion. so I'd inevitably turn evil and conquer the world.
| Good times.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Building Fizzbuzz in Fractran from the Bottom Up (2016)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448283 - Sept 2021 (5
| comments)
|
| _Open Problems in Communication and Computation (1987) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26074413 - Feb 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Remembering John Conway 's FRACTRAN_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142232 - May 2020 (14
| comments)
|
| _Building FizzBuzz in Fractran from the Bottom Up_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866303 - April 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _FRACTRAN_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202367 -
| April 2017 (8 comments)
|
| _Building Fizzbuzz in Fractran from the bottom up_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11894141 - June 2016 (3
| comments)
|
| _In FRACTRAN, every program is a list of functions_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091053 - Aug 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _FRACTRAN - the esoteric programming language invented by John H
| Conway_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119937 - Oct 2011
| (1 comment)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Has anyone made attempts at writing FRACTRAN programs which would
| calculate `78 * 5^(x - 1)` and `2^x`?
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