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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: 5, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Monday April 13 2020, @12:57AM (2 children)
I also implemented life in BASIC -- although on the Commodore PET and in high school around 1980. Seemed a lot faster than what you described but maybe you were using graphics mode in the TRS-80 and had a lot more cells whereas I was using character mode with less cells? I also was doing some assembly then, but I don't remember if I did that with Life. I think now that maybe I started that implementation from this program in BASIC Computer Games: https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=100 [atariarchives.org]
Before that, I wrote a proposal to a science conference/expo for high schoolers to use the game of Life (maybe to be done on a checkerboard) to explore the idea of self-replicating organisms. But that proposal was not accepted for whatever reason. I wish I could find that proposal but I am not sure I kept a copy.
Thinking about all that now, in a way, Conway's game of life bridged a gulf between computers and biology for me -- where connecting computers and biology has been a recurring theme ever since. For example, I worked on a garden simulator and an application to design and breed 3D botanical plants -- both done with my wife who I met in a Biology PhD program. I started in that program to learn how to write biological simulations to make that garden simulator to help people grow their own food and also as a step towards a space habitat simulator -- which I thought of when working with an organic farming certification program in New Jersey while talking to a development director there who was all excited about GIS. My master's thesis in Biology (consolation prize from that PhD program) was on modelling the carbon cycle and climate change. And I currently am doing programming for a company that makes biology-related hardware.
An undergraduate student implemented Life as a final project (with changes to the rules) when I was teaching C for Biologists back around 1992 (as a grad student filling in for a professor who got a detached retina the first week or so of classes).
My wife has the game of Life as a new tab plugin on her Chromebook (which seems to be a real energy hungry app if you leave it running for long).
Thanks for building that bridge between biology and computing for me, John Conway!
To be fair, the movie "Silent Running" also primed me for that, as it connected robots and ecology. Plus I had a much older sister interested in biology and medicine who provided me with things like the Carolina Biological Supply catalog. But Conway's Game of Life forged a solid connection between computing technology and biology for me by being both simple (and thus feasible to do locally) and at the same time being very interesting in an open ended way.
We've come a long way that you can run Life quickly now in a browser: http://pmav.eu/stuff/javascript-game-of-life-v3.1.1/ [pmav.eu]
Plus now there is "the simulation argument" as these ideas have moved into philosophy, metaphysics, religion, and movies...
Stupid me went to Princeton and never thought to look Professor Conway up there and thank him in person -- my career might have turned out very different if I had. Although I am not sure I knew then he taught there when I was a student -- as I ended up in the Psychology Department. I noticed he was at Princeton a year or so ago realizing someone I knew back then who liked computer games a lot then had studied with him in the math department.
RIP Professor Conway. I hope you are on to even better things.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @01:56AM
I saw Silent Running in the theater as a kid. That move really made an impression on me, and then when I saw Star Wars I thought that they stole a lot of the robot stuff from them. And then later whenever I saw Bruce Dern in a movie, I'd say "oh, it's that guy from Silent Running", but the funny thing was it seemed he was usually playing an SOB, which of course was much different tha his role in that movie.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 13 2020, @01:35PM
I appreciate the game of Life was a bridge for you.
But I should mention that cellular automata weren't original with Conway. Nor were self-replicating machines [wikipedia.org]
It's something the Von Neumann had tinkered with long before, in the 50's, including the design of a self-reproducing machine within a cellular automaton.
Conway seemed to have built the Life game exploring the boundary between order and chaos, making something simple (far simpler than Von Neumann's) that was neither too trivial nor too chaotic to be in interest. At that time neither he nor anyone else had any idea whether this would end up being a general computational engine.
Publication of Life in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column resulted in publicity, and it became a fad to build or find interesting configurations.
-- hendrik