A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderYoutube: 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?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/algorithmic-informa... I - Formalisms for Computation: Register Machines, Exponential Diophantine Equations, & Pure LISP Gregory. J. Chaitin > And in Chapter 4 we present a register machine interpreter for this LISP, and then compile it into a diophantine equation.
2021 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Lisp%20Interpreter%20Imple...
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 231
- Total comments
- 33
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-01-05 | A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of LifeFirst breakout · Best thread | peebz | 118 | 25 |
| 2025-12-12 | A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life | fanf2 | 9 | 1 |
| 2025-12-13 | A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)Latest 20+ point return | pabs3 | 104 | 7 |