The Wireworld computer

This site will be unavailable for up to three hours from 2100 UTC on 2025-06-12 owing to server maintenance.<br>--><br>The Wireworld computer

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These<br>pages describe how we went about building a<br>Wireworld computer. Although at least one design exists for a<br>tape-based Turing machine implemented in the &lsquo;Game of Life&rsquo;, ours<br>is, as far as we know, the first ever computer<br>implemented as a cellular automaton that you might reasonably want<br>to write a program for.<br>The design was done by David Moore<br>and Mark Owen, with the help of many others, between 1990 and 1992.<br>It&rsquo;s a testament to our modesty that it was not until September 2004<br>that we wrote up our work.

You will need a browser capable or rendering looped animated<br>GIFs to fully appreciate the pages that follow. Some of<br>the image files are quite large.

This picture shows the display of the Wireworld computer<br>as it calculates primes. The impatient reader will want to go<br>straight to the last section below; those who prefer their<br>gratification less instant can begin with the first.

Julien Thevenon has reverse-engineered the computer design and<br>produced a much more detailed explanation of its inner workings, including<br>high-level language models of various components.<br>You can read his excellent description at the Laboratoire Ouvert Grenoblois website<br>en VO<br>or<br>in English.

Introduction

Signals

The diode

The OR gate

The exclusive-OR gate (includes the &lsquo;exclusive-OR<br>gate joke&rsquo;)

The AND-NOT gate

The ROM

The flip-flop

The binary adder

The register bank

The instruction set

The final design

Jeremy Sachs has implemented the Wireworld automaton in Flash. You can see it<br>running the computer design here.

A modified version of the Wireworld computer which fits comfortably within<br>an 800x600 rectangle in landscape orientation is available in the<br>following formats:

Static<br>wallpaper which you can scale or centre as you wish;

Precompiled<br>xscreensaver<br>code (x86 architecture, run e.g. as<br>./wireprimes -root -delay 10000 &)<br>for use as animated wallpaper or<br>as a screensaver (see<br>http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/<br>for more information; source code available on request);

PowerPC architecture xscreensaver<br>code, kindly provided by<br>Philipp Benner; I have not tested this<br>version.

This page most recently updated<br>Sat Dec 20 03:56:23 PM GMT 2025

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