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Remembering John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language
- pvg 2y agoThread a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547008
- compressedgas 2y agoPosted at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142232
- pjsg 2y agoI attended a lecture from Conway where he described this approach -- but I don't recall him calling it FRACTRAN. I don't even recall what the particular example computed, but the program was around a dozen fractions. This was probably at the end of the 70s while I was a Maths undergrad at Cambridge.
- lambdaone 2y agoI was there. I drew the artwork for the poster for the talk that got pinned up on noticeboards around the univrsity. I met Conway a handful of times, mostly at DAMTP, and he was always interesting, always with new ideas.