It's even been done with Conway's Life.
https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine
It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game.
I'm planning to introduce scripting into my procedurally generated space game with over 2^100 locations. All entity AIs will be s-expressions, which implement a blackboard architecture. This can readily be mapped to both finite state machines and behavior trees. What's more, a variety of scripting language subsets could compile to the same s-expressions. I want to let players license their scripts to other players for in-game money. Players can also perhaps use "hacking" powers, where they can modify scripts of other entities or ships using regexes. (With the caveat that if they cause a syntax error, they get "feedback damage.") Also, these s-expressions can be subject to genetic algorithms, and will also "breed" in the wild. (As described by Koza in his book Genetic Programming)
My contact information is in my HN profile (my username at g mail) if you want to chat more.
Well that was the whole point, he was looking for the simplest possible cellular automaton that was complete. It wasn't necessarily the original point of Dwarf Fortress.
Not sure if that fits into what you're planning at all, but feel free to use the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c
https://archive.org/details/0x10c
https://www.planetminecraft.com/blog/introducing-notchs-new-...
Too bad it got cancelled, it would've been interesting.
I think my favorite is still the Dwarven Calculator, just because overflow errors caused actual magma to overflow, which is just so very Dwarven: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0
It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game.