Remembering John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language

Thread a few months ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41547008">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41547008</a>

I attended a lecture from Conway where he described this approach -- but I don&#x27;t recall him calling it FRACTRAN. I don&#x27;t even recall what the particular example computed, but the program was around a dozen fractions.<p>This was probably at the end of the 70s while I was a Maths undergrad at Cambridge.

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