A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
woodrush.github.ioYoutube: 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?
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.
An entire forum dedicated to the Game of Life? That's pretty cool.
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)
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!
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.
The astonishing Justine Tunney: https://github.com/jart
This is super cool. The levels of abstraction needed to do this makes my geek brain explode. In a good way :)
The next step is clearly to run emacs on this puppy
> 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.
This is awesome, and well deserves all the accolades it's received!
But will it run Doom?
Yes
Enough...with...lisp....
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.
>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.
I like that analogy, a programming language without brackets is like a house without walls, and nil is an empty house.
As I said, the analogy works.
But the house bedroom bathroom kitchen bit is more important than the (((()))).
Maybe I'm thinking about this too much (read, I am thinking about this too much) but maybe the data / use is more important than the structure
Life, like brackets, is about balance. Four walls with a roof don't make a home, but a bed, cupboard, toilet, stove, table, chairs, and bath set up out in the open don't make much of a home either. The internals need the structure just as much as the structure needs the internals.
Can you exit a house built by (balanced) parens?
If not, it's a prison.
You might be right. I haven't escaped yet, I'm wrapped in more parens than I first started.
I still do! People like to talk about Lisp on here because Paul Graham made it cool to. That's it. Are any major/important things be done today that are using Lisp??
Emacs and HN for GNU's, right?
Fine, fine. We can do ISWIM next time.
never!