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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
by 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.