FRACTRAN is a beautiful and beautifully frustrating language. It was devised by John Conway, better known for his Game of Life, which, like FRACTRAN, is built on a simple premise leading to not-so-simple results. Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math Bad Math described FRACTRAN as “absolutely insanely difficult to program in, but based on one of the most bizarrely elegant concepts of computation.” First published in the Proceedings of the 1972 Number Theory, it was popularized in his 1998 Book of...
