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John Horton Conway, mathematician and inventor of Conway's Game of Life has been reported by a colleague to have died from COVID-19 at the age of 82. Conway's death has also been reported (in Italian) by the Italian website "MaddMaths!".
From Wikipedia:
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
Many different types of patterns occur in the Game of Life, which are classified according to their behaviour. Common pattern types include: still lifes, which do not change from one generation to the next; oscillators, which return to their initial state after a finite number of generations; and spaceships, which translate themselves across the grid.
Rest In Peace, John.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 12 2020, @11:09PM (1 child)
If you're looking for novel life forms, brute force or random search is all you can do, because, as they proved with the discovery of the 1st glider gun, Life is unpredictable. Yet the search space can be greatly reduced, the search made more focused, by adding various arbitrary criteria. My own contribution is a very minor discovery. I stumbled upon a pattern that would produce a lightweight spacesnship in something like 69 generations, and leave no debris behind after another 70 or so generations. Posted it to one of the Life boards where, as far as I could tell, no one noticed :p.
"Construction" Life is a whole different game. There, you're using known patterns as building blocks, usually to do some neat computation.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 13 2020, @12:56PM
Construction and discovery -- They are like the two shoes on your feet -- you get further with both. (misquoted from Straczynski's Babylon 5)
The glider gun was discovered, if I recall correctly, by (automatically) shooting random combinations of gliders at each other and filtering the results to identify configurations that might be interesting.
Once they had that, they could set up combinations of glider guns that would shoot out gliders in a controlled fashion to create further glider guns -- a provably unbounded expansion of the Life universe.
Random exploration produced the raw materials for later constructions.
There's a parallel in the discovery of the Conway numbers, which I'm told is one of the things Conway was most proud of.
Conway started out studying take-away games (one of the simplest of of these is the one-heap version of Nim). He invented operations for combining take-away games to make newones, and at some point noticed that some of these operations had properties similar to well-known arithmetic operations.
Finding a specific set of games that actually behaved like the integers was next, and once discovered, apparently by chance (who would have guessed that games would behave like numbers), it was a matter of construction to generalize and choose sets of games that behaved like the real numbers, transfinite ordinals, all fitting neatly into one formalism.
He wrote a book about this, "On Numbers and games", which describes the theory of take-away games, and poits out where in that theory his numbers reside.
Donald Knuth;s book "Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness" presented the number system in a fictional format, without any reference to the game theory. A totally surprising event, when presented without the precursor thinking.
-- hendrik