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Remembering John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language
On April 8, 2020, John Horton Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On April 11, 2020, he succumbed to the disease.1234 Like so very, very many, I mourn Conway’s passing, and yet I also celebrate his life.
I don’t recall playing with it much: There was a lot going on, and it’s entirely possible that I was too busy falling in love with Raymond Smullyan to have curiosity left over for John Conway. Perhaps the most entertaining of all the contributions is Conway’s fascinating article on FRACTRAN, a strange collection of numbers, which when operated on in a simple way, yield all possible computations. In 1979, Ludmila Gregušová and Ivan Korec published “Small Universal Minsky Machines” in The Proceedings of the 8th Symposium on Mathematical Foundations in Computer Science.
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