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I agree, but I'm saying something stronger here. The reaction notation is equivalent to a FRACTRAN program. Given a prime<->species correspondence, it survives a round trip to and from fractional notation, so to speak ("assembly" and "disassembly"). It's just another way of writing prime decompositions.

Perfectly logical agents who can see the entirety of logical consequence would think "eh, what's the big deal? it's equivalent!" But, for whatever reason, the notation finally made me "get" FRACTRAN.



Oh yes, I embrace the distinction you're drawing, I tried to make the same point about "magnificent" Minsky Machines and FRACTRAN programs.

They aren't just "computationally equivalent," they're equivalent "all the way down."




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