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"THE GAME OF LIFE is not your typical computer game. It is a 'cellular automaton', and was invented by Cambridge mathematician John Conway. This game became widely known when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970. It consists of a collection of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Depending on the initial conditions, the cells form various patterns throughout the course of the game." https://lnkd.in/dVq7BAk View in LinkedIn

CELLULAR AUTOMATA. "The game made Conway instantly famous, but it also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata ... Because of Life's analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called "simulation games" (games that resemble real life processes)." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn

VIDEO INTRODUCTION. "Stephen Hawking's The Meaning of Life (John Conway's Game of Life segment)." A very provocative video clip that introduces the Game. Strongly suggest viewing. https://lnkd.in/dBAbK7j View in LinkedIn

THE GAME OF LIFE. "Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. The Game of Life emerged as Conway's successful attempt to drastically simplify von Neumann's ideas." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn

GYMNASTICS. "He's also been infatuated with factoring large numbers in his head; with reciting pi from memory to 1,111+ digits; with calculating, nearly instantaneously, the day of the week for any given date using what he calls his “Doomsday” algorithm." https://lnkd.in/d7BeTe8 View in LinkedIn

CUMBERSOME START. "In 2009, Adam P. Goucher put together a working universal computer-constructor that could be programmed to make a complete copy of itself. The pattern, however, is so huge and slow that it would have taken an enormous amount of work to program it to self-replicate -- it would have been easier to come up with a new replicator design from scratch. Clearly, in hindsight, everyone was waiting for something better to come along." https://lnkd.in/dNTQG9j View in LinkedIn

NEW VISTAS. "Wade’s discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components like the cells in Life. “This discovery is helping us understand the world of constructing things from dumb components." https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE SYSTEM. "Self-replication in Conway's Life has been a topic for discussion and research from the very beginning, over forty years ago now (!). The original purpose of Conway's Life was to find a simplification of John von Neumann's self-replicating machine designs, which used a CA rule with 29 states." https://lnkd.in/dNTQG9j View in LinkedIn

LAUDED ACHIEVEMENT. "Because Wade’s replicator copies itself piece by piece, it is analogous to a photocopier rather than a living cell...because it shows there are multiple ways of solving the same problem. It’s a very impressive technical achievement.” https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

THE GAME OF LIFE. "Ever since its publication, Conway's Game of Life has attracted much interest, because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn