John Conway, Game of Life Author, Dies At 82 of COVID-19 (planetprinceton.com) 52
kbahey shares a report from Planet Princeton: Renowned mathematician and Princeton University professor John Horton Conway died April 11 as a result of complications from the coronavirus. He was 82. Conway made contributions to many areas of mathematics, including game theory, but was most well known for the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. The Guardian once called Conway the world's most charismatic mathematician. "John Horton Conway is a cross between Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career -- until he realized that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries," wrote journalist Siobhan Roberts in a 2015 profile.
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No, that's why there's no news article about them...
XKCD tribute (Score:5, Interesting)
SMBC tribute (Score:5, Interesting)
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As usual, XKCD nails it! RIP JHC
Re:XKCD tribute (Score:5, Informative)
I first remember reading about John Conway in Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American when I was a kid.
Nerd trivia: The Game of Life is Turing-Complete. A NAND gate can be implemented with the cellular automata, and all other logic and RAM can be made from NAND gates.
John Conway also made big contributions to knot theory: Conway Notation for Knot Theory [wikipedia.org].
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Re:XKCD tribute (Score:5, Interesting)
A cool example: an implementation of the Game of Life in... the Game of Life!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Ok, I have to say that was amazing! Thanks for that link.
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One of my favourites, but slightly less well known, are the Surreal Numbers. IIRC he was originally playing around with modeling the game of Go, from the endgame backwards, and stumbled upon the largest possible number system in many foundational theories.
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I think he would have liked that.
Game over (Score:4, Insightful)
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Myself, I'm personally rooting for the human race, so would have been better to see neither of them gone.
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They really should make cognitive therapy mamdatory
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Tim Brooke-Taylor also died of covfevid. Some people might get them confused, but one is a posh buffoon who's mainly famous for ostentatiously displaying the union jack and appearing on panel games.
The other was 1/3 of 70s comedy act The Goodies.
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That flew over a few heads. Well played sir.
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Score:3)
"The other was 1/3 of 70s comedy act The Goodies."
Before that he was in the BBC radio comedy
I'm sorry I'll read that again
along with the other 2 Goodies (Graham Garden & Bill Oddie) and John Cleese (of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers)
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A more detailed list of his accomplishments here (Score:4, Informative)
Although the links in the summary were fine, I liked the detail of this announcement [i-programmer.info] for the extra detail it held.
I always loved the Game of Life, and spent quite a bit of time early on when learning programming writing up complex versions of that - that would make things like creating complex structures easier...
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I would change the rules slightly and hope something interesting would happen. It never did.
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Yes! I also tried some manipulations of the rules but nothing I ever found beat the classic rules for interesting behaviour... I also really found it interesting to explore the various stable forms that were possible, like the glider and blob (forget the real term for that) and so on.
That was what made it such a great game for programmers though, it was just simple enough that even someone without too much experience could code it up, with graphics - and get a really interesting and engaging experience fro
Re:A more detailed list of his accomplishments her (Score:4, Interesting)
I did change the rules once, by accident. I had built a "Conway Computer" with digital logic chips on breadboards. Forgot one little wire, or mispositioned it. The computer ran fine except that a live cell surrounded by seven would survive. Otherwise, the same rules. Many of the usual patterns were the same, Tub, Boat, Traffic Lights, etc. But some were different. This was too long ago, in the 74xx TTL logic chip days, to remember anything specific.
In part, my career in physics and computing is due to JHC's work and Martin Gardner's writings conveying it. Game of Life was the "gateway drug" into a long education leading to advanced quantum theory, physics simulations, image processing and computer vision.
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Looks like... (Score:2, Funny)
he just lost the Game of Life.
YEEAAAAHH!
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Not playing is the only way.
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How exactly do you win?
By inspiring many generations to come.
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That's what she said!
RIP John (Score:2)
I thought (Score:4, Funny)
that he would of died long ago
or at least reached a steady, or oscillating, state...
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that he would of died long ago
>
"would HAVE", please. (Maybe "that he died long ago" would suffice as well, but the "of" really hurts...)
I am sad. (Score:2)
I wrote a GoL program on the PDP8e (Score:1)
Just saw, so Sad (Score:2)
I just saw this, so sad. He was an amazing person with such life. I wish that his zest for life and goodness would spread to Slashdot.
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Here is a nice tribute with stories:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/... [scottaaronson.com]
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (Score:1)
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I bought that doorstep. I use it to lift my third monitor up level with the other two.
Today is a sad day (Score:2)
Blame social distancing (Score:5, Funny)
He couldn't be adjacent to two other people.
RIP John Conway (Score:4)
A Javascript Game of Life Online.. (Score:2)
Oh - And being Turing-Complete... (Score:2)