MetaFilter posts tagged with conway

I will choose free will

kliuless — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:11:27 -0800

The Free Will Theorem - "If there exist experimenters with (some) free will, then elementary particles also have (some) free will." (previously)

Be fruitful and iterate.

fatllama — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:41:03 -0800

Researchers discover gigantic "Caterpillar" spaceship that travels at (17/45)c. Just another exciting development in the Game of Life (previously).

Make a quick trick brick stack

Wolfdog — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:49:35 -0800

Bricks, tiles, and other textures.

Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in! Socrates has scored!

Wolfdog — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 05:39:06 -0800

Phutball (Rules, Java Applet), aka Philosophers' Football or ConwayGo is a deceptively simple 2-player game you can play on a Go board, or any rectangular grid. (It may be simple, but finding the right move is [PDF] NP Complete.)

Jihad U

digaman — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 08:03:48 -0800

President Bush pledged in 2003 that "A free Iraq will not be a training ground for terrorists... A free Iraq will not destabilize the Middle East." This past January, the CIA's National Intelligence Council observed that Iraq had become "a training ground, a recruitment ground" for jihadists. Now the senior Marine commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway -- in a statement that has not yet been picked up by the media -- acknowledges that the war is furnishing a new "a training ground" for foreign fighters trained in urban warfare who will export terror all over the world, saying, "But there's not much we can do about it at this point in time."

Fun With Geometry

mai — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:10:38 -0800

The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota, while now closed, maintains an awesome website with tons of math resources. I like sphere eversion, i.e. turning a sphere inside out. Link is to script of video, which explains things pretty well. Here is a clip [QT]. Also good: notes from a class on geometry and the imagination that John Conway and some friends gave awhile back. Old but good.

It's Life, Jim, but not as we know it

Wolfdog — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 06:53:27 -0800

Beyond Life [Java]. Mirek's Cellebration is an beautiful applet for exploring all sorts of cellular automata. Source code and standalone version also available.

straight — Wed, 29 May 2002 09:03:55 -0800

You may have heard of Conway's Game of Life, where pixels "live" or "die" based on a few simple rules about how many neighbors they have. But did you know that in the 30 years since the game was created, Life enthusiasts have (created? discovered?) an extensive catalog of (objects? creatures?) which interact to form some amazing, nifty, grinning, sometimes beautiful, rube-goldberg, occasionally even a little scary patterns often starting from the simplest of building blocks? (Including a Turing machine!) Or that a lone pixel can exert remarkable control over its environment? Now you can see in a few seconds in a java applet, on your desktop, or even on a PalmOS handheld the outcome of simple patterns that, when first discovered, no computer could handle. A mind blowing example of the power of emergent properties.

chrismear — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 13:14:22 -0800

Eric's Treasure Trove of Life. The cellular automaton known as 'Conway's Game of Life', that is. Many things to see, from the Table to the B-Heptomino, and even an AK47 Reaction. There's a huge community out there devoted to discovering new 'still lifes', 'puffers' and 'induction coils'. Who would have guessed Life could be so interesting?