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I have fond memories of going through reams of graph paper, manually simulating Conway's Game of Life. This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I l

I have fond memories of going through reams of graph paper, manually simulating Conway's Game of Life. This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I loved to follow the evolution of gliders and other emergent phenomena. This was before the days that personal computer programs existed to do the simulation for you. It's so much more satisfying to do it by hand. Later, I was fascinated by Conway's chained arrow notation[1], which is used to concisely represent unimaginably gigantic numbers. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation

slavik81 7y ago
Richard Guy, the discoverer of the glider in Conway's Game of Life, also passed away last month. In 2017, Richard gave a talk for the 50th Anniversary of the University of Calgary (and his 100th birthday). Much of it was recounting stories of his past in response to questions from the audience. When asked about the glider, he told us how Conway came up with the Game of Life and invited a number of colleagues to help investigate its implications. They spent the next few days just simulating the Game of Life by hand on graph paper. Richard happened to come across it from one of his initial conditions. Today you could discover the glider in minutes by playing with an interactive simulation. It's interesting how much more effort it used to be. I suppose, though, that you'd build better intuition and understanding doing it by hand.
- eru 7y ago
  You'd get more intuition per experiment ran. But don't underestimate the power of quantity.