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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 hendrikboom on Monday April 13 2020, @12:25PM (2 children)
The version of Life that most impressed me back when was the Amiga implementation.
They managed to use the Amiga's 2d graphics chip (a blitter with some logical operations) to get 17 generations per second, full-screen, with each square of the Life board taking one pixel.
It ran at animation speed. You could see the groups swarming around and living, spreading, and dying.
An impressive show.
No doubt a lot better could be done on today's GPUs.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:48AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 14 2020, @12:23PM
Thanks for the interesting link. It looks as if I might have been the first to use quadtrees in Life. I wish I still had the source code.
I remember wondering about the kinds of speedup later used in hashlife, but I'm sure I wouldn't have had enough memory to actually use them.
I now wonder if sharing memory between different quadtree nodes would save enough memory that the intergeneration hash table would have been feasible. I suspect not.
-- hendrik