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acid andy [soylentnews.org] writes:

John Horton Conway, mathematician and inventor of Conway's Game of Life [wikipedia.org] has been reported by a colleague [twitter.com] to have died from COVID-19 at the age of 82. Conway's death has also been reported [simai.eu] (in Italian) by the Italian website "MaddMaths!".

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

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.

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