Name: Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine
Start: 2025-11-27T17:30:00+01:00
End: 2025-11-27T21:30:00+01:00
Location: Dellaertweg 9e

You can make a printer play *Super Mario Bros*. Or build *Excel* into a video game console. Why do these absurd things work? Because these systems—yes, even Excel—are *Turing complete*. That means they’re powerful enough to simulate any other Turing-complete machine… given enough time, memory, and stubbornness.

Now for the fun part: in this kata, we’re going to explore Turing completeness using something that looks way too simple to be a “computer” at all—**Conway’s Game of Life**.

Created in the 1970s by mathematician John Conway, the Game of Life isn’t really a game. You don’t control anything. You just set the initial pattern of cells on a grid, hit play, and watch them live, die, and evolve according to just **three simple rules**.

That’s it. No code. No CPU. Just squares turning on and off.
And yet… those tiny rules are enough to build logic gates, memory, even full-blown computers. In theory, you could run *Linux* entirely inside the Game of Life. Yes, penguin-powered cellular automata.
Curious how lifeless dots on a grid can become a computer? Join the dojo. We’ll show you, step by step, how to coax computation out of chaos—no magic, just math, patterns, and a dash of madness.

**Time:** 18:00 - 21:00 (walk-in from 17:15 with food and drinks)
**Location:** Dellaertweg 9E, 2316 WZ Leiden

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#### 

Mark Schuit is a senior software engineer at FreshMinds, who believes great coding is a team sport best played with wit, curiosity, and communication. Before joining the tech world, Mark was logistics manager for theatrical events, a career that took him across the globe and taught him that solving problems is as much about people as it is about processes. Now, whether he’s working on projects or mentoring developers, he’s passionate about building solutions that are as elegant as they are maintainable.



Mark Schuit

Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine

Dellaertweg 9e

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Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine

Future-proof Software Development by FreshMinds

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