The mathematician John Horton Conway has died, apparently due to the covid-19 epidemic, at the age of 82. I never met him but by all accounts, he was a delightful person and brilliant mathematician; his charming book on introductory game theory, Winning Ways, is the most fun you can have reading a university level math text. I had just purchased a biography, Genius at Play, before the crisis began and I suppose I’ll have time to read it now.
I’m sad, of course; we are all diminished when we lose a delightful and brilliant teacher. I’m also angry at the frankly disgusting attitude I see in the media and in the actions of elected officials that it is somehow no great loss to society when a disease predominantly kills the elderly. Scrooge’s they had better die and reduce the surplus population was meant to be taken as the horrifyingly Malthusian ranting of a bitter, foolish man who ought to know better, not as words to live by.
But I don’t intend this to be another rant as to the utter, abject, criminal stupidity that has informed the response to this pandemic. Rather: I have been wanting for over a decade to write a series on my blog about Conway’s most famous invention (I almost said discovery, because it seems like such a natural part of my world), Conway’s Game of Life. Now seems like a good time.
When I was a teenager I collected back issues of Scientific American — mostly from the sadly now gone Casablanca Books in my home town. Lots of the articles were interesting, but mostly I wanted a set of all the Martin Gardner, Kee Dewdney and Douglas Hofstadter’s monthly columns on mathematics and programming.
ASIDE: A note to any teenagers reading this who are collecting bulky old stuff like me. Keep it. When I moved across country I took my National Geographics and Tolkien biographies, but I sold my SciAms and Doctor Who novelizations for pennies on the dollar because they were bulky and I figured I wouldn’t miss them. And now only 25 years later I wish I still had those memorabilia.
I kept photocopies of Gardner’s articles on Life in 1970 and 1971 that introduced the phenomenon to the world. I find it fascinating to think about how Conway and the other people who made initial discoveries must have worked, without fast computers and fancy graphics; Conway said in the original 1970 article “it is marvelous to sit watching on the computer screen”, so there must have been some graphical system, but I can only imagine that it was quite primitive.
Over the next few weeks I’ll recapitulate my own experience with Life, though with much better hardware, software, and coding skills than my initial forays on my Amiga 500 as a teenager. We’ll start with the basics and work our way up to an astonishing result: it is possible to compute trillions of generations per second on Life boards with trillions of cells using an ordinary desktop computer.
I have learned recently that Conway did not consider Life to be the important work that he wanted to be remembered for — though I must say, if there’s something you don’t want to be remembered for, maybe don’t spend a decade popularizing it — but Life is for the ages; it will outlive us all. Early exposure to Life made me think about programming in ways I had not before, and I am grateful to John Conway for giving me and so many others that inspiration. I’ll leave it to my mathematical betters to remember his lasting contributions to professional mathematics.
Next time on FAIC: We’ll begin at the beginning with the rules of the game and some straightforward implementations.
Fabulous adventures in coding 
Eric, I have to say that I’m really looking forward to this. Thanks for everything and take care!
Thanks, nice read ! I didn’t know the book you mentioned and I googled it. Instead of the title Genius At Work, I found this Genius At Play. Probably you refer to this book. Correct ?
Well that is a very telling slip up, isn’t it? đŸ™‚ Yes of course you are correct.
I first implemented Conway’s Game of Life on an Amiga 500, too!
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Really looking forward to the series too! I once did an implementation using 37 (I think it was) BitBlts on the full array – blisteringly fast it was!
One nit, though: Martin Gardner (only one ‘e’) and AK Dewdney (transpose ‘en’)
You can do Life with 10 blits with the Amiga blitter. Tomas Rokicki wrote a program for that, which I used in my own program. Tomas’ version is apparently available on Fish Disk #31.
My goodness I’m so excited for this series
The first time I wrote a life game was in the 70s. I was at junior college in Montreal (CEGEP), taking a Fortran course – my first exposure to computers. I wrote it using Fortran two-dimensional arrays. The generations were shown as arrays of “X” and ” ” printed out on gree- bar, fan-fold paper on a line printer. I used up a lot of trees.
Really excited for this series! Thanks! Still hoping you’ll one day pick up the zork one too. Really gutted you let that one die (or hibernate for an unknown period of time) đŸ˜¦
I miss the Zork series too!
Yeah, I had a bunch more episodes ready to go and then I got SUPER BUSY at work and needed to pare it back. I still hope to pick it up again.
For many years I’ve speculated that the Big Bang (13.8 billion years ago) was a physical implementation of a variant of the Game of Life, similar to glider guns (and higher order generators that create multiple glider guns) that produce more and more things that we recognize as particles (photons, quarts, etc.). Readers of this blog should check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
You are not alone in that speculation; you might wish to read “A New Kind of Science” by Wolfram. I have never read it, but it goes into many of those same speculations. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics for a great many variations on this idea. I find them implausible myself, but I am pretty ignorant of fundamental physics so I’m not one to judge.
I’ve had Wolfram’s book for years. I even got well over 100 pages into it. But so many interesting things to read, so little time…
BTW, I also vote for more Zork articles. A couple of decades ago I could.not.open.the.egg in Zork 1, so I disassembled the interpreter and figured out enough to write some programs (in an early C compiler on a Z80) that not only dumped the Vocabulary and what I called the ActionTable, but also disassembled the Z-Code, and even wrote a simple decompiler. But I finally got the damned egg open and finished the game!
Indeed, the egg puzzle is a tricky one, though at least it has the desirable property that the solution to the puzzle makes sense in the world of the game. Not all the puzzles in Zork do. Some day I’d like to do an in-depth review to contrast Zork with Planetfall. Obviously they have a lot in common in terms of mechanics, but Planetfall does so much better in terms of creating a motivated protagonist, a realistic sci-fi world with sensible puzzles, a backstory that explains how the world got to be how you found it, and so on. Zork is a puzzle game; Planetfall is *interactive fiction*.
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