Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 712

Wireworld is a CA that Brian Silverman came up with a long while ago. Now some folks - see below, I'll let them credit themselves as they prefer - have shown how to build a computer out of it, a computer that follows the rules of wireworld rather than those of physics, as it were.

In particular they show a construction implimenting a simple program to calculate the primes. Mark Owen has a website about it, here -

http://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html

Here is their own "abstract" -

"These pages describe how we went about building a Wireworld computer. Although at least one design exists for a tape-based Turing machine implemented in the `Game of Life', ours is, as far as we know, the first ever computer implemented as a cellular automaton that you might reasonably want to write a program for. The design was done by David Moore and Mark Owen, with the help of many others, between 1990 and 1992. It's a testament to our modesty that it was not until September 2004 that we wrote up our work."

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