If you like this, you will love: http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-peopl...

an IC design game set in Soviet Russia.

Awesome! have a gif of a working calculator? Reminds me of the way that people would build digital electronics in the 'powder-toy' genre of games. Was that an inspiration for this project?

Now all we need is a Verilog to GIF compiler.

The part about crossing wires creating a transistor is actually conceptually very similar to what real IC layouts look like, although in the latter there are multiple layers and only the bottom two - polysilicon and diffusion - interact to create transistors:

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Visual_circuit_tutorial

Reminds me of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [1], which he used to build a universal constructor [2], but that historic rule made it much harder to cross signals. (You could easily modify the rule to make that easier, but then it wouldn't be historically accurate, which is what makes it so interesting: he designed the rule and the universal constructor in his extremely powerful mind and on ordinary paper!) It's able to create and destroy wires, to the extent that it can actually build other machines and even replicate itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

This is fantastic! Would be great to get it running in canvas.

Reminds me a bit of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld

Very cool. It reminds redstone circuits from Minecraft.

building simulations is the strength of computation assisted intuition