Remembering John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language(raganwald.com)
25 pointsby iamwil10 months ago3 comments
  • pvg10 months ago
    Thread a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547008
  • pjsg10 months ago
    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.

    • lambdaone10 months ago
      I 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.