A. K. Dewdney has died | Hacker News Reader

A. K. Dewdney has died

lfpress.remembering.ca

175 pointsschoen44 comments

His Computer Recreations column was a huge influence on me as a kid and I imagine lots of other nerds in a similar (and maybe not so similar) age cohort.

He helped start the fractal craze - there was hardly an article you could read about it that didn't mention his Mandlebrot piece. Core War has made the rounds here but there was so much more - my first encounter with public key cryptography, all sorts of computer generative art, genetic algorithms, simulations ecological and celestial and on and on.

The pieces always had a practical bent - something you could typically implement on your own (or school's) dinky computer. Many were also a side door to entire branches of mathematics - diff. eq. class can feel like torture but simulating your way to the Volerra-Lotka predator-prey model is fun. Plus it sounds like something invented in a Weyland Yutani research lab.

For the flavour, a recent HN post right in the Spirit of Dewdney category, the kind of adventure a Computer Recreations column might take you on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39745923

Another one is the popular twitter account of gravitationally interacting bodies animations.

A.K. Dewdney made Steve Jobs's 'bicycle for the mind' quip real. His works were a blessing, may his memory be one too.

He had an outsized impact on me as well. My very first programming experiments (learning on the Macintosh) were predator-prey simulations (fish vs. sharks — he called it "Wa-Tor" since his ocean grid wrapped around with a toroidal topology.)

Re-reading his stuff now is fun: I find I understand it a lot better than college-age me did back in the 1980's.

Plenty of his work can be found on archive.org [1]

"Armchair Universe" [2] is a nice collection of a number of his "Computer Recreations" columns — I think "The Tinkertoy Computer" [3] as well.

As someone mentioned, his "The Planiverse" [4] was an extension to Abbott's "Flatland".

[1] https://archive.org/search?query=A.+K.+dewdney

[2] https://archive.org/details/armchairuniverse0000dewd_x2e7

[3] https://archive.org/details/tinkertoycomputer00dewd

[4] https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd_y8t2

His book "The Planiverse" was one of the first books I read as a kid that really made me think. I was fascinated by his detailed descriptions of a 2D universe and its implications for how that would affect biology, society, and everything else.

I greatly enjoyed this book. Is there a copy of it online ?

libgen has it, but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant.

Ebay has used copies for ~12$. I got a few to give away to nephews & nieces who might be interested in this kind of thing

+1 I LOVED it. Huge, huge, influential book in my thinking when I read it at 11 or 12. It led to interest in world simulations, sociology and how it relates to physical structures and limits, physics simulations, and so much more.

One of my favourites. I had a nice wide copy as a kid and recently bought a new one for my kid. Was disappointed in the small blurry reproduction of the diagrams. So get a used copy!

He had a real gift for making theoretical topics interesting. I read his book The New Turing Omnibus (https://archive.org/details/newturingomnibus0000dewd_q3p6) as a teenager, and credit it with a decent part of getting me into computer science. Rest easy.

Another thankful note from me for The New Turing Omnibus. It’s recommended to students entering Cambridge University in the UK, and I read it as a young teenager. I was already familiar with a lot of the concepts contained, but it was a really good stitching together of a variety of disciplines. It gives just enough of a peek into each of them to spur curiosity about the things you might want to study more — and at least makes you aware of the things that you might be less interested in.

Loved New Turing Omnibus too. It felt very exciting to program some basic genetic algorithms and even the Newton-Raphson method as a teenager

I also read _The New Turing Omnibus_ as a young CS student. I really enjoyed reading about all those different areas of Computer Science.

I spent an excessive amount of time playing with an animated version of Dewdney's wallpaper algorithm from The Turing Omnibus, first with 286 fixed point arithmetic and later with 486 FPU code.

Hah, I went through a similar cycle with Mandelbrot stuff - first with custom fixed point on a 6502, then I somehow got my hands on a prototype Apple ][ FPU card of some sort, then there was the 386/387 (sweet sweet 80 bit floats!), etc.

A Weitek math coprocessor board that snapped on to a 6502 would be a fun project.

I googled it up, it was a Bulgarian variant of this Am9511-based (the first FPU, according to AMD!) bad boy:

http://www.apple-iigs.info/doc/fichiers/CCS%207781B%20Arithm...

https://www.applefritter.com/content/arithmetic-processor

Nice find!

> "Apple APU. The Model 7811 B Arithmetic Processor Unit is intended to increase the execution speed of Applesoft II programs and the number of math functions available. The system employs an AMD9511 APU and plugs into one of the Apple expansion slots. The CCSoft interpreter is loaded from the diskette provided, and the system is ready to, go. The CCSoft interpreter is identical to Applesoft, except that CCSoft sends arithmetic functions to the APU for fast execution. Additional functions include AsiN(x), ACOS(X), LOGIO(X), SINIH(x), COSH(x), TANH(X), INVERSE(x) and PI. "

He also was a worthy successor to Martin Gardner in his Scientific American columns, and like Gardner, collected those columns into a series of books, The Tinkertoy Computer, The Magic Machine, and The Armchair Universe. What made his columns a bit different from Gardner's is that writing in the 1980s and 1990s, he often presented the puzzles and what not as ideas for readers to program on their home computers.

Robin Hanson reviews Planiverse here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-planiversehtml which might give you an idea of what some of his work was like!

> The book seems crazy wrong on how its mystical quest ends, and on its assumed connection to a computer simulation in our universe. But I presume that the author would admit to those errors as the cost of telling his story. However, the book does very well on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and low level engineering. That is, on noticing how such things change as one moves from our 3D world to this 2D world, including via many fascinating diagrams. In fact this book does far better than most “hard” science fiction. Which isn’t so surprising as it is the result of a long collaboration between dozens of scientists.

I discovered Core Wars through his Computer Recreations column and enjoyed playing it for years. I still love his line about “programs doing battle in the dark and noiseless corridors of core”.

RIP

Discovered a tiny but alive Corewars contest online in the early 2000s and discovered the wonders of computer communities over distances that were insurmountable in real life. Thank you.

Is the contest continuing in the present ?

I think it’s much quieter but perhaps it is just needing a few new HNers to discover the intoxicating subtlety? http://www.corewars.org/

There's still some occasional activity on KOTH.

http://www.koth.org/koth.html

The various hills:

    Last battle concluded at : Wed Feb 28 11:12:29 UTC 2024
    Last battle concluded at : Sun Mar 31 23:34:21 UTC 2024
    Last battle concluded at : Sun Mar 31 23:31:47 UTC 2024
    Last battle concluded at : Fri Feb 2 12:56:46 UTC 2024
    Last battle concluded at : Sun Mar 31 14:14:39 UTC 2024
    Last battle concluded at : Tue Jan 3 18:37:10 UTC 2023

'88 standard doesn't seem to be as popular as the '94 standard.

http://www.koth.org/info.html has scans of the original article.

Corewars is great and was my first contact with programming when I was a child, as my father was (and still is) a very active member of its small community. I also won two youth computer science contests with a topic about corewar. It's very dear to my heart and probably what ignited my love for programming overall and changed the course of my whole life :)

Ah where does the community hang out these days?

My memory is that it used to be some irc and a lot of an email group, but memory too fuzzy.

I just found my copy of Planiverse, bought at the University bookshop - I was in my 3rd year of my engineering course when it was published. Just rereading the introduction when it covers the simulation program 2DWORLD I remember at the time thinking it would be cool to develop such a program. I'm quite surprised that one was hasn't really developed (of course lots of the 2d scrollers and roguelike games could be thought being in that vein, but I'm thinking of the more detailed physics and biology that A.K. explored in the book). Or is there something like it out there?

Planiverse was one of my favorite books in my teenage years, and by chance last week I started reading it again. What a coincidence to see the author's name on HN front page today. May he rest in peace, his mind influenced many of us.

I love the concept of the story, that something life-like can emerge from computer software, and the illustrations in the book are wonderful. I also like that the author included a kind of mystical or metaphysical point - similar to Flatland - about our own existence and reaching for what's beyond it.

> is there something like it out there?

Somewhat in the same direction is "Lenia - Biology of Artificial Life".

> We report a new system of artificial life called Lenia (from Latin lenis "smooth"), a two-dimensional cellular automaton with continuous space-time-state and generalized local rule. Computer simulations show that Lenia supports a great diversity of complex autonomous patterns or "lifeforms" bearing resemblance to real-world microscopic organisms.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05433

I'm so grateful to him, his early work was a massive influence for me as a kid. I lent one of Dewdney's books to a neighbor friend's dad, an architect, and he gave me my first paid gig as a programmer. Can't overstate the influence in my career.

Also, I distinctly remember his column showing how to generate text based on statistics learned from an existing corpus. It has come to mind more than once in this last period of LLM magic -- the essence was already there.

Thank you and rest in peace.

For the ultimate referent of "Maltese Cross Movement", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive

For the proximal referent: http://elumiere.net/especiales/hancox/dewdneybroomer_en.php

His monthly column in Scientific American often inspired me. I wouldn’t be where I am today without him. He will not be forgotten.

I used to buy used Scientific Americans just to read his column. RIP

Boy, reading his articles in Sci Am in my formative years probably affected how I think in 2024 more than any other person, other than maybe Martin Gardner (well, aside from family members)

Such a shame what has happened with Sci Am as a publication since then.

When I pick it up now, it feels like I'm reading a tabloid magazine.

It's a dim shadow of its former self.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Dewdney

"Dewdney was a member of the 9/11 truth movement, and theorized that the planes used in the September 11 attacks had been emptied of passengers and were flown by remote control.[13] He based these claims in part on a series of experiments (one with funding from Japan's TV Asahi) that, he claimed, showed that cell phones do not work on airplanes, from which he concluded that the phone calls received from hijacked passengers during the attacks must have been faked."

well... I must admit that was unexpected.

I interpret this sort of thing as a symptom of an undiagnosed brain disorder. More a cause for pity than anything else.

Wow, I didn't see that twist coming either. A sad reminder that conspiracy thinking can strike even people who are otherwise seemingly very rational.

Yes, because it is rational. Maybe taking it this far isn’t when you consider personal impact, but questioning things is very rational, and there are more than enough legitimate examples (MKULTRA, Operation Northwoods, and countless other declassified operations that were regarded as conspiracies in their time) to justify not accepting things at face value.

There are declassified documents from the Warren Commission where they basically concede that parts of the CIA could have been involved. And there IS significant fishiness around 9/11 (the missing trillions, back when that was a lot, building 7, etc), it should be questioned. That doesn’t mean assuming US involvement, it just means not assuming that there wasn’t any. Because there it should be clear by now that most of government does not have the people as a priority.

The Epstein island was a “conspiracy theory” at least a decade before it was known, and it’s still considered “conspiracy thinking” to say it was an intelligence operation, when that’s the only rational explanation given all the details. And there was someone that had him suicided under the public eye, it’s not inconceivable to me that those same people would facilitate a domestic terror attack. Especially after reading declassified CIA documents proposing similar false flags.

Yes, I kept trying to follow his work after he left the column, but the work he went through, the extreme twists he put on logic and credulity in order to absolve the murderers of wrongdoing, that put me off.

It's a very odd thing is it not.

He was also Muslim, which is not directly said on that wikipedia page. Related or not it is definitely part of his identity.

I was a regular reader of his columns in Scientific American. I think I have one of the anthology books.

I enjoyed the columns, tickled my geeky interests. Outside of what I read in SA, I didn’t know anything about him. He was just a by line on a magazine column.

That said, I was honestly quite stricken when I heard he was not just suggesting 9/11 conspiracy theories, but the ones he was touting were so outrageous.

Like I said, I didn’t know anything about this person. I don’t know how in or out of character such things were for them.

But, personally, I was rather devastated and disappointed when I heard about it.

RIP, condolences to his family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAG7Y8WGDcI

what's the connection?

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