Do regex dream of Turing Completeness? by Daniel Magliola We're used to using Regular Expressions every day for pattern matching and text replacement, but... What can Regexes actually do? How far can we push them? Can we implement actual logic with them? What if I told you... You can actually implement Conway's Game of Life with just a Regex? What if I told you... You can actually implement ANYTHING with just a Regex? Join me on a wild ride exploring amazing Game of Life patterns, unusual Regex techniques, Turing Completeness, programatically generating complex Regexes with Ruby, and what all this means for our understanding of what a Regex can do.