Name: Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine
Start: 2025-11-27T16:30:00.000Z
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

Future-proof Software Development by FreshMinds

FreshMinds

Makif Nayman

Coding Dojo - Simulate a Turing-complete machine

Dellaertweg 9e

FreshMinds - Future proof Software Development

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