Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine

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