You make me a bit jealous, rubbing shoulders with Conway and Gosper. Martin Gardner's October 1970 column in SciAm introduced me to cellular automata, and I spent a few hours meticulously tracking generations on a checkerboard before it occurred to me that the university's IBM 1130 was probably better than I was at that sort of thing. Soon friends and I were writing competing Fortran programs for that 1130, monopolizing it all night every night, calculating Life.
I corresponded with Gardner once or twice, and subscribed to Robert T. Wainwright's Lifeline newsletter, which had begun a taxonomy of Life objects and reported community progress. Our little group was surprisingly competitive in the beginning, considering the limited resources at our backwater university, but when the MIT group kicked into high gear the exploits of Gosper, Woods and others at MIT were simply mind blowing. Woods' Atavist backtracker, Gosper's Glider Gun, the first discovery of a Garden-of-Eden configuration... who could compete with that? And Gosper continued to amaze with his astonishing Breeder.
Conway's GoL inspired other acquaintances, electrical engineers. One of them built a special-purpose computer to compute generations; he'd have surprised to know then that the computer was Turing-complete. Another EE pal built a crude raster display for the lab's Nova 1220 mini, with the specific intent to display GoL generations. Hardly such a thing as glass TTYs in those days, kids.
Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.
> Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.
I corresponded with Gardner once or twice, and subscribed to Robert T. Wainwright's Lifeline newsletter, which had begun a taxonomy of Life objects and reported community progress. Our little group was surprisingly competitive in the beginning, considering the limited resources at our backwater university, but when the MIT group kicked into high gear the exploits of Gosper, Woods and others at MIT were simply mind blowing. Woods' Atavist backtracker, Gosper's Glider Gun, the first discovery of a Garden-of-Eden configuration... who could compete with that? And Gosper continued to amaze with his astonishing Breeder.
Conway's GoL inspired other acquaintances, electrical engineers. One of them built a special-purpose computer to compute generations; he'd have surprised to know then that the computer was Turing-complete. Another EE pal built a crude raster display for the lab's Nova 1220 mini, with the specific intent to display GoL generations. Hardly such a thing as glass TTYs in those days, kids.
Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.