#john conway

Conan on a computer? (Scot Bayless illustration from his article "Byte the Bullet," The Space Gamer 15, Metagaming, January-February 1978)

In his article Bayless created a simple fantasy game with two competing species based on the Life Game by John Conway, popularized by Martin Gardner, and wrote a flowchart that could be coded as a computer program. From there he made the leap to describe very briefly how rules and decision making in a board game or RPG could be programmed. He warned that you probably would need discs or bubble memory for storage instead of cassette tapes. He noted that the price of computers still was high but was falling, and some people could find access to them through local community colleges and universities.

" Il 7 marzo 1953 James Watson e Francis Crick andarono a pranzo insieme ad alcuni colleghi in un ristorante di Cambridge, e il secondo annunciò loro inaspettatamente: «Oggi abbiamo scoperto il segreto della vita». E non era una boutade, perché quella mattina i due erano riusciti a mettere a posto i pezzi del puzzle della doppia elica del DNA: una struttura che sarebbe diventata un’icona della scienza moderna. I romantici e gli esistenzialisti si offendono quando sentono dire che la vita si può spiegare in termini materiali e scientifici, e che il suo segreto è racchiuso nella struttura di una macromolecola e nei suoi meccanismi di riproduzione. Se dunque uno stupido come Blake già si lamentava che Newton avesse tolto la poesia dal mondo spiegando la luce e la gravitazione, chissà cosa avrebbe detto di Watson e Crick. Per non parlare di John Conway, che nel 1970 inventò Life, un gioco costituito da una scacchiera infinita, ciascuna casella della quale si accende se due o tre di quelle adiacenti sono accese, e altrimenti si spegne per «isolamento» o «sovraffollamento». Poiché anche in un mondo così semplice la vita si forma e si riproduce naturalmente, è stupido pensare che essa richieda un mondo complesso, per non parlare di un Dio onnipotente. "

Gosper Gun

Story from Allan Wechsler on the Math-Fun list:

"I don't know if the story has gotten lost, but Gosper described to me pretty much exactly what he did to find the glider gun. He went into it pretty much knowing what he was looking for, had a well-defined plan of attack, and it worked.

The genesis of the idea was a pattern called a queen bee, which takes fifteen generations to blop down a beehive on one side and then turn around. In the next fifteen generations it lays another beehive on the other side, and turns around again. The next time it tries to deposit a beehive, it fails because there is already a beehive there, and the resulting explosion stops the oscillation.

A block can be positioned so that it eats the beehives that the queen bee produces on one side. If you put such a block on both sides, you create a stable period-30 oscillator called a queen bee shuttle.

Gosper's idea was to position two queen bees so that they would each try to create a beehive, from opposite sides. Suppressor blocks were placed on the *outside, (*so that the pattern would look like: Block Queenbee Interaction-area Queenbee Block.) There were a few dozen relative placements of the two queen bees such that the beehives they placed in the interaction area would, in fact, interact, and about fifteen possible phase-differences between the two queen bees. So there was a search space of several hundred possibilities, and in most of them the colliding beehive-embryos would explode and destroy the pattern, and in some they would just die (creating an interesting new p-30 oscillator). Gosper's hope was that one of the arrangements would create debris that would spawn one glider and then die before the next queen bee started dropping cruft in the interaction area. Small patterns that produce one glider and then die are fairly common, so Gosper had good reason to expect success, and sure enough, the Gosper gun was discovered.

The Samara is a vast network of fern prairie, grassland, and savanna that makes up much of the Democratic Republic of Samaraland. When I began writing the first Gondolend story that would go through entirely more rewrites and permutations than necessary and eventually become The Beasts of Kulig County it was mostly based on the flat open prairie of northeastern South Dakota, where I grew up.

But as time went on, and I fleshed out the area and its culture more, it became more inspired by parts of sub-Saharan Africa like Botswana and the Masai Mara.

There's still a bit of South Dakota there in how a lot of the local economy is based around ranching and agriculture, but now it has a much more African vibe.

The indigenous peoples who call the Samara home are also largely inspired by various sub-Saharan cultures.

Since I think body art is cool, a lot of Samara tribes practice various forms of traditional tattooing, scarification, and body painting, which combined with their often elaborate and colorful styles of clothing makes a visit to Samaraland a very visually interesting experience. Sort of like Wakanda from the MCU, but with more of a mid-to-late '90s technological level.

In terms of wildlife, a lot of the Samara's native fauna is based on the Jurassic Morrison and Tendaguru formations, with some Cretaceous animals thrown in as well.

(Art by John Conway.)

(Art by Greg Paul.)

(Art by Emiliano Troco.)

Of course, centuries of human habitation have taken their toll on the Samara's native wildlife, with many species being seriously threatened; in particular the kifokubwa, Torvosaurus, is almost extinct within Samaraland, though OutBarrier populations are, as far as anyone knows, doing just fine. In many parts of the Samara large theropod populations have been so severely depleted that the ratanga, a species of landcroc growing up to seven meters in length, has begun to occupy the niche of top predator.