Conway's Game of Life – Mathematics and Construction [pdf]

Organic, non synthetic conway's game of life as a service, ONSCGOLaaS:

You pay a slave worker from Amazon mechanical turk to manually calculate the next iteration of a Conway's game of life state. Unlike traditional approaches that use CPUs or GPUs to calculate the next state for a given Conway's game of life state, here the next state is calculated organically, by a human or rather the humans brain. This creates a more grounded experience of Conway's game of life, leading to increased appreciation of it.

Naturally we'd be web3 ready and sell those different, handcrafted states of Conway's game of life as NFT.

We will also offer cheaper, machine created NFT of Conway's game of life states that are calculated by the blockchain VM.

Please contact me if you are interested to invest in this idea.

This book is great for learning about the discoveries in Life beyond the level of the usual pop science articles. It covers the development of amazing machines like the 0E0P metacell that can simulate other cellular automata within Life. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/0E0P_metacell

Life, in high school in the early 70s, one of the first programs I wrote was an implementation in basic. Really taught me matrix manipulation and I was fascinated by the pattern generation. Still have it on yellow paper tape! Fueled my interest in comp sci and programming.

First time I ever came across Game Of Life was in an interview test for a tier two tech company you will have heard of. I managed to get a working implementation in 45 minutes but didn’t get the job as my solution was “inelegant”

Of course it was! It was the first time I’d ever come across it (self taught dev, electronics degree) and I was actually pretty pleased with what I did under interview conditions after 2 other coding tests.

Anyway, it was an interesting test, shame I didn’t get the job - especially since I smashed the LRU Cache and compression algorithm tests.

Conway died last april from Covid. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture of him once.

He used an old-fashioned overhead projector, the type where a strong light shines through a plastic sheet. The plastic sheet was filled with formulas and stuff but on top of that was a sheet of paper. Initially the screen was dark, but as the lecture progressed he would tear-off bits and pieces of the paper to reveal more and more of the slide underneath. Entertaining and literally illuminating his topic.

For the history minded, this was one of the proto-hacker’s target for speed and language learning. Coupled with a super Star Trek game in basic. Man, good times.

I think of the Game of Life as not-quite-right excitable reaction-diffusion systems. The advantage of the latter is that they have a mathematical representation as a parabolic partial differential equation. They can exhibit such patterns as spirals and diffraction effects.

My first computer in BASIC in 1970. I/O on a teletype, since CDTs were still vector and scarce.

In 1975 I implemented in TTL and oscilloscope output for MIT digital electronics class. Blazing fast.

Cool stuff! Thx for this work.

How come there's still no proper mechanical implementation of Life?