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

by iamwil on 4/7/2025, 11:36:24 PM with 4 comments
  • by pvg on 4/7/2025, 11:40:10 PM

    Thread a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547008

  • by pjsg on 4/8/2025, 2:23:36 PM

    I 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.

  • by compressedgas on 4/8/2025, 6:42:57 AM

    Posted at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142232