[Noisebridge-discuss] emergent forms in Conway's Life

[Lx Rudis]

daniela:
>  This is for michael,  the scope expert..

wow, i like!  ...a quick read took me to the pdf regarding deformation of 3d shapes, which reminded me of a talk i _failed_ to attend at the 2k7 VCF at the comp history museum in mtn. view.  

fortunately, a friend got it on his camera and posted it on youtube.  i thought it pretty interesting, and am hoping that one or two of you will also.  if not, sorry for the spam.  

i'll kick off with some explanation, then the links:


http://www.vintage.org/2007/main/session.php
..."He [gosper] became intensely interested in the Game of Life shortly after John Horton Conway had proposed it. Conway conjectured on the existence of infinitely growing patterns, and offered a reward for an example. Gosper was the first to find such a pattern (specifically, the Glider gun), and won the prize. Gosper was also the originator of the hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude..."

title of the talk:
Recent Developments in Conway's Life and a Miniblast from Macsyma's Past
When asked to provide an abstract for his talk, Bill replied:
              "Abstract: No abstract. Only concrete."

some bait to pique interest:
"Get ready for a talk by legendary old school hacker Bill Gosper as he takes you on a magical mystery tour of Life, numbers, and hacking."


here's his talk, sorry in advance about the reverb-y audio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpgA2oCQj9o&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxEyoujzxw&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppnadmuDRIs&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wmg7xZLtjU&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_AXix3ALeM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cplgw4h_zgk&feature=related


for those who don't know [of] him:
"...Ralph William Gosper, Jr., (born 1943) known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey. [1] Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. He is also noted for his work on continued fractional representations of real numbers, and for suggesting the algorithm (which bears his name) for finding closed form hypergeometric identities.

Gosper enrolled in MIT in 1961, and received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965. After taking a course on programming in his second year with John McCarthy, Gosper became affiliated with the MIT AI Lab. His contributions to computational mathematics include HAKMEM [1] and the MIT Maclisp system. He also made major contributions to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT, later working with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. on the greatly improved commercial versions..."

seeya!

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