nand2Tetris is a famed online course where you build a computer from the ground up — learning to chain together logic gates like AND and OR and NAND until you've built virtual hardware that can run Tetris. As essayists have described, it's deeply edifying, giving you a "I know kung fu"-like vision into the intellectual molecules of modern computation.
I've always intended to do nand2Tetris, but until I find the time, here's a lower-barrier-to-entry offering: NandGame, which starts you off with only the NAND gate, and challenges you to gradually build ever-more-complex circuits by using it to craft inverters, AND gates, XOR, etc.
I just spent the last hour playing it, and it's a blast! An early level demands you create an OR gate from NAND gates, AND gates, and inverters, and when I finally got it working I punched the air. It's a puzzle game based on computer logic, which is Xtremely my jam.
Brings me back in time, too. When I was a grade-school kid in the late 70s, some extremely forward-thinking elementary-school librarian acquired a book describing how computer logic circuits worked, and detailing how to build them using electromagnetic relays. It also showed how to chain NOR gates into a flip-flop circuit that would remember information — and when I saw, in grade 6, how a machine could be coaxed into remembering something, it fried my brain and almost certainly set me on the path where I'd spend my entire adult life reporting about computation and its effects on society.
So playing this game, in addition to being merely fun, was also a Proustian trigger for me. Whoever that librarian was, thank you!
(via gnat's superb Four Short Links blog)
