A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

One interesting thing about this is that it serves as a kind of simplified demonstration of the kind of computation that must be occurring or could occur with actual cellular biology. DNA really seems somewhat like a tape in a Turing machine (although technically a read-only one). But the entire system does compute a result which is an organism.

I knew GoL was turing complete so theoretically this <i>should</i> be possible. I just couldn&#x27;t even imagine imagining wanting to try.<p>So this is rather impressive.

This makes me wonder. If cells were occasionally activated in random positions, what sorts of modifications to the architecture would be necessary to make the system robust and still able to carry out its computations with a reasonable probability of success? Would that even be possible? In other words, what kinds of modifications to this system would make it more like a natural biological system that has to cope with noise and interference from its environment?

Next target is a bacteria based lisp.

Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata?<p>I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on &quot;bit processors&quot; if it ran on special purpose hardware?<p>So instead of 64-bit processors we might have &quot;64-cell processors&quot; ?

Shameless plug: Have some fun over possible setups of cellular-automata (which conway&#x27;s game of life is a subset of): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aperocky.com&#x2F;cellular-automata&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aperocky.com&#x2F;cellular-automata&#x2F;</a>

Not so exciting but still pretty cool: Conways Game of Life in a few lines of otus lisp* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yuriy-chumak&#x2F;ol&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;samples&#x2F;Convey&#x27;s%20Life&#x2F;life.lisp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yuriy-chumak&#x2F;ol&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;samples&#x2F;Conve...</a><p>* otus lisp is a descendant of owl lisp (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=utOVF0U7Zd8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=utOVF0U7Zd8</a>) with a nice ffi - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yuriy-chumak.github.io&#x2F;ol&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yuriy-chumak.github.io&#x2F;ol&#x2F;</a>

How come the GoL runtimes are only ~300 times longer than the VarLife runtimes? Is it because the metapixels can be more efficiently simulated than running the game of life rules? Or because of sparsity of cells or some-such thing?<p>This is seriously cool BTW.

Now we need to find Life implementation in List and bootstrap it from there.

I still can&#x27;t get over how much interest the game of life maintains since it&#x27;s invention. It might just be my favorite &quot;field&quot; of CS at this point. It&#x27;s such a satisfying intersection of maths, coding, &quot;biology&quot;, and &quot;biological engineering&quot;.

Next: Street Fighter II in Game of Life.

Has anyone done Conways game of life in Conways game of life?

Can anyone explain in an accessible way how we go from a changing pattern on a 2d grid to &quot;add these 2 numbers&quot; or &quot;if x do y&quot;?

Love this. Next step: host Emacs on life.

Now all we need is Conway&#x27;s Game of Life written in this lisp.