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Clever. Does this count as CSS being turing complete yet?


Somebody implemented Rule 110 with CSS and HTML, so I guess it is. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300836


As the discussion from that thread concluded, it all comes down to how you define "turing completeness" with respect to the status of turing machines as necessarily abstract constructs, what with their requirement of infinite time/space. It also depends how you view the need for human interaction to drive computation as being relevant to the definition.

Neither of these things were really central ideas in turing's original work, so its kinda open to interpretation.


Can you use CSS to throw your browser into an infinite loop?


I've seen this, in situations where a link is set to become bold when the mouse pointer is hovering over it. The result is that the text becomes bold, and redistributes itself. Having redistributed itself, the bold link is no longer under your mouse pointer, so the link shrinks back to normal font weight. Now the link is back under your mouse pointer so it becomes bold again. Repeat.


A Turing complete machine can require a manual intervention for each step. But yes, if you keep clicking an infinite number of times it can be.




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