Turing Complete

Posted on Thu 26 February 2009 by alex in geek

LittleBigPlanet continues to be a source of wonderment for me. Today I did a search for "calculator" to find the apparently famous LittleBigCalculator only to find there were many implementations. The calculator is fairly simple in that it can only add and subtract numbers between 0 and 99 but it is a lovely example of what can be achieved with the engine. This led me to a lovely little Sack Boy logic tutorial starting with AND gates and building up more complex logic from that. The tutorial covered Half Adders and ended with a full blown BCD coding and decoding implementation with calculator style displays. Implementing digital electronics through the medium of kinetic physics simulation is possibly one of the most inefficient uses of CPU time ever, I suspect it will be a while before we see the first LittleBigDifference engine. I wonder how many programmers of the future will have implemented their first bit of logic in the game?