Conway's Game of Life was my first and always is my favorite thing to be programmed (the runner ups are the Mandelbrot set and strange attractors), to the point that I messed around with its rules and became the continuous CA you see at the bottom of the blog post.
And the technologies and science have changed a lot. It was Pascal and Assembly and maybe BASIC in my first try, now it's Python, TensorFlow, WebGL etc. Back then I know nothing about the theory of complex systems, it turns out that the Game of Life and a whole bunch of fascinating emergent systems are at the crossroads of complex systems, artificial life, and artificial intelligence research (see Neural CA, CA-NEAT, etc).
As for Conway's resentment of his own creation, I was told that his friend showed the continuous CA to Conway last year, and he was mesmerized by its complexity. I hope that means the great mathematician was delighted by the direct offspring of his brainchild that he was once ashamed of.
And the technologies and science have changed a lot. It was Pascal and Assembly and maybe BASIC in my first try, now it's Python, TensorFlow, WebGL etc. Back then I know nothing about the theory of complex systems, it turns out that the Game of Life and a whole bunch of fascinating emergent systems are at the crossroads of complex systems, artificial life, and artificial intelligence research (see Neural CA, CA-NEAT, etc).
As for Conway's resentment of his own creation, I was told that his friend showed the continuous CA to Conway last year, and he was mesmerized by its complexity. I hope that means the great mathematician was delighted by the direct offspring of his brainchild that he was once ashamed of.