Bret Victor came to our office yesterday, and we had a great chat. He is a great thinker and has a beautiful sense about visualizing abstract ideas. I really like his works. I want to learn his idea more, but as a starter, I tried to implement his early famous Alligator Eggs! game. This game was made to teach about lambda calculus to eight years old kids. But it's even more fun to adult hackers!
This is a green alligator and her egg. This family shows a lambda expression λx.x (because I know you are not an eight years old, I use formulas without hesitation!). There is a no animation as there is nothing to eat.
But things are getting fun when there is something to eat before the alligator mother. In this case, a blue egg. If you click on the diagram, you see what's happening (I only tested Chrome, Safari, and Firefox). The alligator eats the poor blue egg. But price for the sacrifice is too high. The mother will die, and we will see the new baby.
And then, things are getting curiouser. The new baby doesn't look like the mother at all, rather it is like a blue egg, the victim of the slaughter. What's a amazing nature of the lambda land!
This is slightly a hard example. There are two alligators "x" and "y", and two victim eggs "a" and "b" on the right side. If there are more than two things next to an alligator, the alligator eats left one first (it is called as left associative in jargon). Can you guess what does happen after the meal? Alligator "x" eats egg "a", and alligator "y" eats egg "b". And only egg "a" survives (because it transmigrates through the green "x" egg).
You can think that this alligator family (λx.λy. x) eats two things and leave the first one. In a same way, can you think of an alligator family which eats two things and leave the second one? Here is the answer.
There are a few things to know more. Old alligators are not hungry. But they keep guarding their family while they guard more than one things. They behave like parenthesis in a lambda expression.
This rule is the most tricky one. There are two blue alligators "y" at left and right, but those two are not in a same family. The only mother of the blue egg "y" is the right one. It gets trickier when the family is eaten by the green alligator because the blue family is reborn at the green egg is, where is bottom of another blue alligator. To make them different, the right blue family change the name and color to "y1" and orange.
By these rules, you can make various kinds of alligator ecosystem. This is my favorite one. (λx.x x) is called a "Mockingbird" or, rather we should call it Mockingalligator. It doubles its prey twice. So what happens if a mockingalligator eats a mockingalligator? The result is called one of omegas, an infinite loop. They are eating forever. To stop the endless violence, please click the diagram again. But please do not to click three times! Because of my bug, something wrong will be happening.
This is dangerous but beautiful one. The omega ecosystem above kills each other but it doesn't make any, but this Y combinator is very fertile. It produce many, so you have to watch it carefully, otherwise it consumes all the CPU power you have eventually!!
Actually, alligators also can do serious jobs. If you design carefully, you can teach them how to calculate 3 + 4! In this example, the middle family represents three and the right family represents four (count green eggs). And the result is a family with seven green eggs! This is called Church numbers (I don't have a time to explain the theory, so please read the link).
I only introduced very few alligator families. If you want play it, visit http://metatoys.org/alligator/ and design by your self. You can also download from http://github.com/propella/AlligatorEggs. The source code is messy because I haven't written javascript recently, but I'll clean it up soon.