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'Tetris' Recreated In Conway's 'Game of Life' (stackexchange.com)
In 1970 mathematician John Conway created rules for the "Game of Life," a now famous "zero-player game" where a grid of cells evolves (following Conway's rules) from an initial state proposed by the player. In 2013 someone challenged readers of StackExchange's "Programming Puzzles & Code Golf" section to devise an initial state "that will allow for the playing of a game of Tetris."
An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that "This challenge sat around, gathering upvotes but no answer, for four years. Then, it was answered." Citing the work of seven contributors, a massive six-part response says their solution took one and a half years to create, and "began as a quest but ended as an odyssey." The team created their own assembly language, known as QFTASM (Quest for Tetris Assembly) for use within Conway's mathematical universe, and then also designed their own processor architecture, and eventually even a higher-level language that they named COGOL. Their StackExchange response includes a link to all of their code on GitHub, as well as to a page where you can run the code online.
One StackExchange reader hailed the achievement as "the single greatest thing I've ever scrolled through while understanding very little."
An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that "This challenge sat around, gathering upvotes but no answer, for four years. Then, it was answered." Citing the work of seven contributors, a massive six-part response says their solution took one and a half years to create, and "began as a quest but ended as an odyssey." The team created their own assembly language, known as QFTASM (Quest for Tetris Assembly) for use within Conway's mathematical universe, and then also designed their own processor architecture, and eventually even a higher-level language that they named COGOL. Their StackExchange response includes a link to all of their code on GitHub, as well as to a page where you can run the code online.
One StackExchange reader hailed the achievement as "the single greatest thing I've ever scrolled through while understanding very little."
Conway's game of Life has been shown to be Turing Complete, so it can do anything any computer can do. You can use glider generators to construct a NAND gate, and then use NAND gates to construct any logic circuit, including a CPU.
Someone should write a compiler to run arbitrary software inside the automaton system.
Eventually entropy will destroy the universe. Even if you've survived normal human mortality, the end of the Earth, and the end of the Sun (etc, etc, etc)... ultimately absolutely nothing you've ever achieved will have any significance whatsoever.
These guys had fun doing something difficult just to do it, and they didn't hurt anybody else in the process. THAT is actually the most significant thing you can manage in our universe. Just deal with the fact that you're less important than they are and get on with the remainder of your meaningless existence.