John Conway has died • Hacker News Board

Re: John Conway has died

#11

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

I have fond memories of going through reams of graph paper, manually simulating Conway's Game of Life.

This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I loved to follow the evolution of gliders and other emergent phenomena. This was before the days that personal computer programs existed to do the simulation for you. It's so much more satisfying to do it by hand.

Later, I was fascinated by Conway's chained arrow notation[1], which is used to concisely represent unimaginably gigantic numbers.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation

Re: John Conway has died

#12

Post by mark-r » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #4

How sad :-( Game of life was one of the first things I've coded in the early 80s I was really proud of as a kid (highly optimized Z80 maschine code to make it as fast as possible per frame). I was hugely inspired by the concept, especially by gliders. I thought Conway to be a Genius. He might have gone but the Game of Life and the inspiration it brings will always be with us.

I don't think there's a better example of complex behavior emerging from simple rules. He was truly a genius.

Re: John Conway has died

#13

Post by steveklabnik » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

keithflower wrote: post #5

Worthy of HN border acknowledgment, please.

Second this, very much so. I’ve emailed the mods.

EDIT: I typo’d the email address but we got a black bar so.

Re: John Conway has died

#14

Post by Insanity » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #2

People here might know him best for the "Game of Life"[0], but he did so much more. The book about Conway by Siobhan Roberts is an interesting read about the man and his work. There's a review here.[1] Some will know Conway via is work on the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (with many others), some via his "Look and Say" sequence, while still others will know his book "Winning Ways"[2], written with Richard Gu…

I think many of us have indeed programmed a GoL at some point. I've repeatedly done that when learning new languages a decade ago.

May he rest in peace

Re: John Conway has died

#15

Post by KingOfCoders » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #12

KingOfCoders wrote: post #4

How sad :-( Game of life was one of the first things I've coded in the early 80s I was really proud of as a kid (highly optimized Z80 maschine code to make it as fast as possible per frame). I was hugely inspired by the concept, especially by gliders. I thought Conway to be a Genius. He might have gone but the Game of Life and the inspiration it brings will always be with us.

I don't think there's a better example of complex behavior emerging from simple rules. He was truly a genius.

Yes, that was so mind blowing to me as a kid and still is decades later.

Re: John Conway has died

#16

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

abpavel wrote: post #8

I know he resented to be known for the game of life, because of all the other wonderful works, but it will forever standout in our memories of him because of profound influence it had on us.

> I know he resented to be known for the game of life ...

I talked with him about that. There was a period where he got very angry if someone wanted to talk to him about it, because to him it wasn't the most interesting thing, and most people didn't get the point anyway.

Later in life he mellowed a bit, and he certainly talked about it with me without rancour.

Re: John Conway has died

#17

Post by intuitionist » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #2

People here might know him best for the "Game of Life"[0], but he did so much more. The book about Conway by Siobhan Roberts is an interesting read about the man and his work. There's a review here.[1] Some will know Conway via is work on the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (with many others), some via his "Look and Say" sequence, while still others will know his book "Winning Ways"[2], written with Richard Gu…

There were better contemporary mathematicians than John Conway, and there were (a handful of) better contemporary popularizers of mathematics, but no one else came close to doing both nearly as well.

I met him on a few different occasions when I was very young (middle and high school), and he was always extremely generous with his time, especially with an interlocutor not legally old enough to drink, and clearly brilliant in person. One example of his generosity was his collaboration on a book about triangle centers[0] with the late Steve Sigur, who was not a research mathematician but a high school teacher.

Of course the Game of Life is an enduring classic, but I’ll also always have fond memories of Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays and Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (affectionately known as SPLAG). The mathematical world has truly lost a living legend.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Triangle_Book.html?...

Re: John Conway has died

#18

Post by tombert » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

This is worthy of a black bar. John Conway was a legend.

I know that he was annoyed by the association with the game of life, but I still have to credit it with my fascination with cellular automata. For the past ten years, I have used GOL as my “Hello World” for learning a new language.

RIP John.

Re: John Conway has died

#19

Post by mrwnmonm » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

COVID19?

Re: John Conway has died

#20

Post by jayturley » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

The Game of Life is responsible for getting me into computing back in the early 80s. Spent a summer implementing classifier systems at VA Tech in the 90s and never had so much fun. A great mind that will be greatly missed.