Just look at some of Damion's previous work. At a recent Perl conference, he demonstrated a Turing Maching inside Conway's Game of Life. I never would have thought this was possible, and coming from anyone else, I would have thought it was a joke. But there Damion was up on stage, showing that the whole thing worked out.
"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.
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His name is Damian :-) — Damian Conway. But he's not the Conway from Conway's Game of Life.
The thought that Life can be used to run a turing machine isn't too surprising btw — they're both cellular automata, and just about anything you can do with one of those can be emulated with the aid of another.
If that blows your mind, try reading the proof that Minesweeper is NP-complete.
Makeshifts last the longest.
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Or maybe he is the Conway from the Game of Life. In any case, we'll keep our Conway. (With apologies to TimToady).
I've seen the Minesweeper-NP-completeness thing before. I was trying to make a program to play minesweeper a while back, ran across that paper, and gave up. The solution would have been either a boring brute-force algorithm, or something that would get me a whole heap of cash when I used it to break encrypted credit cards win the NP-complete challenge contest.
"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.
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