What is starvation?

Imagine you’re in a queue to purchase food at a restaurant, for which pregnant women have priority. And there’s just a whole bunch of pregnant women arriving all the time. You’ll soon be starving. 😉 Now imagine you are a low-priority process and the pregnant women are higher priority ones. =)

Why can Conway’s Game of Life be classified as a universal machine?

Paul Rendell implemented a Turing machine in Life. Gliders represent signals, and interactions between them are gates and logic that together can create larger components which implement the Turing machine. Basically, any automatic machinery that can implement AND, OR, and NOT can be combined together in complex enough ways to be Turing-complete. It’s not a … Read more

How to program a fractal?

Programming the Mandelbrot is easy. My quick-n-dirty code is below (not guaranteed to be bug-free, but a good outline). Here’s the outline: The Mandelbrot-set lies in the Complex-grid completely within a circle with radius 2. So, start by scanning every point in that rectangular area. Each point represents a Complex number (x + yi). Iterate … Read more

What is Turing Complete?

Here’s the briefest explanation: A Turing Complete system means a system in which a program can be written that will find an answer (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). So, if somebody says “my new thing is Turing Complete” that means in principle (although often not in practice) it could be used to … Read more

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