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

woodrush.github.io

11–20 of 28 posts

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

#11
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?

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

#12

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?

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.

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

#13
post #3

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!

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

#14
post #13
post #3

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 wr…

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.

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

#15

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?

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.

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

#16
post #8

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.

Emacs and HN for GNU's, right?

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

#18
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

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
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