Re: excited us Biologists
Emergent systems have a strange tendency to overshadow their creators. And the later work by others on his creation has gone to some strange places. For example people have built whole Turing complete state machines inside it. Some of that work has since moved on to Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, but their is are unbroken chains of causality leading from GoL to many of those project.
The game of life was a simple tool to explore complex systems, and one that many of us have a sense of nostalgia for. Conway should be missed for many other reasons, but this little thing that I first stumbled across on a dusty 5 1/4" floppy disk cast a long shadow.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
