The Game of Life

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Image © Guardian Newspapers
   I picked up the Journal from last Thursdays' Guardian earlier, which reminded me I hadn't done anything about the obit for John Horton Conway posted in that edition. For those who don't know his name, he was a mathematician who was perhaps most famous for inventing The Game of Life, a cellular automaton originally realised on a Go board, but later implemented in software and which became a staple of programming exercises for those learning coding. Those of us who cut our programming teeth on BASIC in the Seventies will almost all have tried to write a version of this on some early microcomputer, as they were then universally known. Although he had a an ambivalent relationship with his creation, it still fascinates coders and quite appropriately mutates and develops new morphologies to this day: many, many versions and interpretations of it can found for all computer and mobile platforms. Example source-code for just about every programming language known is out there for those interested in trying their hand.
    I was struck by a curious resonance between the algorithm that drives The Game of Life and R - the reproduction factor that governs the rate of viral transmission, something of which we are all only too aware at present. A tragic resonance, too: Conway died at the age of 82 after contracting COVID-19.

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