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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, @01:14PM
I did an implementation in the 70's on Unix on the PDP-11.
It's a small-memory machine (even by the standards of the 70's, having only 48K of RAM) so saving space was important.
I decided to store the world as a quad-tree, having noticed in previous runs that a lot of the world consisted of voids where there was nothing. On the average, I recall, that at each level of the quad-tree, about two of the smaller quads were populated. So this ended up being a huge space-saving.
I also kept track of which quads had seen any change in the previous generation, so I could focus on those quads and their neighbours.
This was in the days of character-only CRT terminals.
To save screen space, I put two Life squares in each typed terminal, giving four combinations:
: ' ,
Yes, I typed a space there too, though you might not see it.
When the size of the game board got larger than the screen capacity, I summarized the leaves of the tree; the display would just show which of some higher level of the quad-tree were populated.
It ended up being a small amount of quite tricky code,
I was an amusement for an afternoon or two. I actually got a request for a copy of the program from Kees Koster at another academic site.
He said his students were going to waste time playing Life anyway, and he thought he'd like to avoid them wasting their time writing inferior Life programs.
I don't know if they every improved on my code.
-- hendrik