Comment by Sesse__

2 months ago

CSS is Turing complete :-) You can find pure-CSS implementations of Game of Life, for instance.

The implementations I have seen rely on the inclusion of HTML form elements, and a manual step to update the state.

So in that sense CSS + HTML + User Interaction is Turing complete. But that is a different language then CSS, even if a part of that language happens to be written in CSS.

  • https://propjockey.github.io/css-conways-game-of-life/infini... as an example. No user interaction except to start.

    • This is impressive. 43000 lines of CSS. Do you know how this works?

      EDIT: For the record, while I am very impressed, and this is a wonderful work of art we can all enjoy, I am not convinced this is proof of the Turing completeness of CSS. At most this would prove that CSS + HTML is Turing complete (which still better then CSS + HTML + User instructions in natural language). But I wonder if in these 43000 lines of CSS the entire state space was encoded (with some clever compression obviously), and I am not sure if that would count as proof of Turing completeness.

      1 reply →

I don’t think that’s true, unless you count hardcoding the state evolution into CSS variables, one var per cell per step.