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I know Conway was slightly resentful that game of life overshadowed some of his other work in the public's imagination, but I've always been entranced by it. I

by suby 6y ago

I know Conway was slightly resentful that game of life overshadowed some of his other work in the public's imagination, but I've always been entranced by it. I remember as a child the first computer my family had was a dual boot of Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.1 (or something like that?). On the Windows 3.1 side was a version of Conway's Game of Life which was preinstalled, and I'd spend hours messing around with it. You could place two different colors of cells, and I'd set patterns up and then let the simulation go to see which one would "win", or outlast the other. Conway's Game of Life was also one of the first meaningful things I'd programmed, and even today I like to reimplement game of life when learning a new langauge. Typically I like to let the user assign different colors to the grid, and have new cells born be a blend of all of their neighboring colors as a kind of simulation of natural selection. Right now I'm learning network programming for game development, and I'm finishing up a networked implementation of game of life so multiple people can join and manipulate a running simulation. In general I think it's a good project to use when playing around with learning something new. I just really like cellular automatons, and game of life in particular.

pier25 6y ago
> had was a dual boot of Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.1 (or something like that?) I had one of those too. I think Windows was more like the desktop environment of DOS.
- aj7 6y ago
  I pity you guys. Finder 6 was 10 years ahead.
Chakazul 6y ago
Conway's Game of Life was my first and always is my favorite thing to be programmed (the runner ups are the Mandelbrot set and strange attractors), to the point that I messed around with its rules and became the continuous CA you see at the bottom of the blog post. And the technologies and science have changed a lot. It was Pascal and Assembly and maybe BASIC in my first try, now it's Python, TensorFlow, WebGL etc. Back then I know nothing about the theory of complex systems, it turns out that the Game of Life and a whole bunch of fascinating emergent systems are at the crossroads of complex systems, artificial life, and artificial intelligence research (see Neural CA, CA-NEAT, etc). As for Conway's resentment of his own creation, I was told that his friend showed the continuous CA to Conway last year, and he was mesmerized by its complexity. I hope that means the great mathematician was delighted by the direct offspring of his brainchild that he was once ashamed of.
Akronymus 6y ago
> I know Conway was slightly resentful that game of life overshadowed some of his other work in the public's imagination, but I've always been entranced by it. He seems to have come to terms with it.[1] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&feature=youtu.be

by suby 6y ago

pier25 6y ago

> had was a dual boot of Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.1 (or something like that?) I had one of those too. I think Windows was more like the desktop environment of DOS.

aj7 6y ago
I pity you guys. Finder 6 was 10 years ahead.

Chakazul 6y ago

Conway's Game of Life was my first and always is my favorite thing to be programmed (the runner ups are the Mandelbrot set and strange attractors), to the point that I messed around with its rules and became the continuous CA you see at the bottom of the blog post. And the technologies and science have changed a lot. It was Pascal and Assembly and maybe BASIC in my first try, now it's Python, TensorFlow, WebGL etc. Back then I know nothing about the theory of complex systems, it turns out that the Game of Life and a whole bunch of fascinating emergent systems are at the crossroads of complex systems, artificial life, and artificial intelligence research (see Neural CA, CA-NEAT, etc). As for Conway's resentment of his own creation, I was told that his friend showed the continuous CA to Conway last year, and he was mesmerized by its complexity. I hope that means the great mathematician was delighted by the direct offspring of his brainchild that he was once ashamed of.

Akronymus 6y ago

> I know Conway was slightly resentful that game of life overshadowed some of his other work in the public's imagination, but I've always been entranced by it. He seems to have come to terms with it.[1] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&feature=youtu.be