Conway's Game Of Life Quotes

What conditions have to be in effect for evolution by natural selection to occur? The words I put into Darwin's mouth were simple: Give me Order, and time, and I will give you Design. But what we have subsequently learned is that not every variety of Order is sufficient for evolvability. As we saw illustrated by Conway's Game of Life, you have to have just the right sort of Order, with just the right mix of freedom and constraint, growth and decay, rigidity and fluidity, for good things to happen at all.

This is perhaps ZZT’s most impressive quality: its ability to transform, to become anything other than Town of ZZT. In 2009 Drake Wilson released Preposterous Machines, a collection of machines built out of massive systems of Objects interacting—often by way of shooting. Bullets were transmitted from Object to Object like electrical impulses. What are the machines? A sinewave grapher. A calculator. A machine that solves the Towers of Hanoi. A Mandlebrot visualizer. An implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, the famously complex cellular automata that springs from a set of four rules.

A particular cellular automaton, devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970 and known appropriately enough as The Game of Life, has become quite fashionable, and exhibits a remarkably rich and complex ecology of shapes that move and interact.

Alan Turing’s halting problem: you can’t know if the cells will all die off without running the game until they do die off. Thus, Life, a two-state process governed by four rules, is computationally irreducible. Von Neumann designed the universal constructor with the objective of self-replication; Conway designed his cellular automaton without any specific objective in mind. But he observed, “If you couldn’t predict what it did, then probably that is because it is capable of anything.

the Charlie Conway? This guy scored the game-winner on a penalty shot, no bucket!