John Conway has died • Hacker News Board

Re: John Conway has died

#131

Post by agentultra » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

He was my mathematical hero. I never had the opportunity or privilege to be a student of his but I imagine it must have been extraordinary. I really enjoyed his books, ONAG, his work on groups and his contributions to the sphere packing problem. Most of all his playful way of writing and teaching. A true performer.

I will miss him.

Re: John Conway has died

#132

Post by skei » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

I had dinner with John Conway in 2013. I was just leaving Princeton as a psychic and a mutual friend set it up as my goodbye party.

He was quite extraordinary to speak to. We talked about a whole host of things, and he signed his book for me. I'm very sorry to hear of his passing.

Re: John Conway has died

#133

Post by lainwashere » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:10 AM UTC

Good night, sweet prince

Re: John Conway has died

#134

Post by lihaciudaniel » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

RIP Conway

Re: John Conway has died

#135

Post by davidw » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

mrwnmonm wrote: post #19

COVID19?

Looks like it https://twitter.com/SamWangPhD/status/1249132655737790464

(I know I'm curious to know that too - but I don't get why we do care... the result is the same?!)

Re: John Conway has died

#136

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

I did t meet Conway, nor see him lecture, nor am I a mathematician. When I was young I read about the Conway Game of Life and it sparked a long fascination with alife. I spent a lot of time on a old laptop, playing about with dot, ants, rules, genetic algorithms, mostly in qbasic. Good times.

Re: John Conway has died

#137

Post by eru » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #109

Insanity wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was my first program in Turbo Pascal. Until then I'd been a BASICA programmer and opposed to "structured programming," which I thought would stifle my creativity. I'd spend long days with code printouts all over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to find my bugs. Then dad brought home Turbo and I tried it out with the GoL. It worked correctly the first time it ran. That had never happened to me before. I never touch…

Have a look at Hashlife (eg via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife) to see some exciting ways to compute GoL faster.

Re: John Conway has died

#138

Post by eru » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 5:50 AM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #94

pmoriarty wrote: post #11

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…

Richard Guy, the discoverer of the glider in Conway's Game of Life, also passed away last month. In 2017, Richard gave a talk for the 50th Anniversary of the University of Calgary (and his 100th birthday). Much of it was recounting stories of his past in response to questions from the audience. When asked about the glider, he told us how Conway came up with the Game of Life and invited a number of colleagues to help…

You'd get more intuition per experiment ran. But don't underestimate the power of quantity.

Re: John Conway has died

#139

Post by antonzabirko » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 7:07 AM UTC

Coronavirus death

Re: John Conway has died

#140

Post by JdeBP » Sun, Apr 12, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

CraigRo wrote: post #123

Conway was a legend in the math department. Possibly because he actually lived there -- at one point he got kicked out of his house, and took the office opposite his as a bedroom. A few months later, an artist showed up to paint portraits of famous mathematicians around the border of the ceiling. Apart from that, the login to his computer required calculating the correct day of week of 10 dates in the last 2000 years…

It indeed isn't a particularly difficult algorithm. It's just modulo 7 arithmetic and some divisions combined with a table lookup. Martin Gardner of course covered it. I first encountered it in Shakuntala Devi's book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers, which has a slightly different lookup table. With practice, one can run it as the date is being given, a common lightning calculator trick for making things faster, and the lookup table becomes directly memorized. In practice, the algorithm is rarely applied outwith the past 400 years or even the past 100, for obvious reasons. Tweaking for the century is an afterthought in several accounts that I've read over the years.