This is simply… incredibly impressive. I wasn’t expecting they would build a computer all the way up from a CPU and memory to an assembler to a compiler, all in the game of life.<p>Kudos.
Related. Others?<p><i>Build a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38760965">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38760965</a> - Dec 2023 (2 comments)<p><i>Build a working game of Tetris in Game of Life (2013)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907893">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907893</a> - Sept 2022 (1 comment)<p><i>Build a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life (2014)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871417">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871417</a> - April 2020 (11 comments)<p><i>Building a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247935">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247935</a> - Sept 2017 (2 comments)<p><i>Building a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246348</a> - Sept 2017 (46 comments)
Building larger switching squares out of smaller ones reminds me of the infinite zoom recursive life game: <a href="https://oimo.io/works/life/" rel="nofollow">https://oimo.io/works/life/</a>
I love how projects like this can give folks a chance to understand and derive computer mechanics from scratch, in a visual way. I feel like living in the land of bits and high level constructs for too long really creates black boxes and fear that it’s too complicated to ever understand the metal. Projects like that dismistify things in clean 2d space. Props, and great write up!
It's an ugly and stupid computer and the "display" is barely visible. It also doesn't have a cache, or MUL/DIV/MOD instructions. Not very impressive. It wasn't even actually made in the Game of Life.<p>Also, if I had 1p for every time someone saw a hobbyist CPU and asked "can it run Doom", I'd be a zillionaire.