Conway's Game of Life

[Charles Matthews]

I believe I have in my possession the go board on which, in 1968 we believe, John Conway invented his Game of Life, a well-known a cellular automaton. See Wikipedia.[1]

https://twitter.com/CharlesMatthe12/sta ... 5203291140 for an image of the board.

This forum seemed a better place to discuss the provenance. At one point, probably in the 1980s, I repossessed from the common room of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) the old go board that was left around there. I remember mentioning to Conway I was doing that - it does belong to the Cambridge University Go Society, with CUGS marked on the back - so it was presumably before 1986 when he left DPMMS (to which I then belonged).

It has odd markings: points of the compass suggesting you look at it landscape rather than portrait (ugh). I think these identify it. The reserve equipment of CUGS, with me for many years, contains three more of these thin old boards marked "CUGS", and one more that says "Reading Go Club".

I believe, and would appreciate confirmation, that in 1968 these boards would have been used in the UK, by clubs such as Reading and Cambridge.

It may well also be associated with the early history of Phutball (see Wikipedia [2]). Offers from museums?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phutball

[xela]

What an interesting find!

In the mid '90s, the DPMMS common room was on the top floor of a fairly run-down building in Mill Lane. They'd long since stopped playing go, and backgammon was the dominant sport.

Are we talking about the same room, or had they moved since 1980?

[Charles Matthews]

In the mid '90s, the DPMMS common room was on the top floor of a fairly run-down building in Mill Lane. They'd long since stopped playing go, and backgammon was the dominant sport.

Are we talking about the same room, or had they moved since 1980?

Certainly: before the new department in west Cambridge. At one point I did actually play go at teatime there with Alex Selby; but as you say, go was never endemic in DPMMS in the way backgammon was.

It may have been earlier when I repossessed the board on behalf of the go club: could have been in the later 1970s when I was an official.

[John Tilley]

Charles - I was a member of the Cambridge University Go Society from October 1966 to June 1969. I got a grant from the University to buy some boards in my first year - it was for £25. In those days you could buy eight pints of beer for £1, so it was actually quite generous. I can't remember what boards we bought though. Having thought about it I can only think of two sources then, MitsuKiku in London or direct from Japan. A folding Japanese board with thin glass stones direct from Japan was $9 including sea-mail shipping. In January 1967 £1 was $2.4

It is possible that there was another source and that is what your board came from - I am guessing that Jon Diamond and I would have gone for boards that we could get quickly, rather than wait 3 months to arrive from Japan.

I have to say that I thought the Go Society was CUGOS rather than CUGS - but it's too long ago now to be sure.

Best Wishes - John

[Charles Matthews]

Having thought about it I can only think of two sources then, MitsuKiku in London or direct from Japan. A folding Japanese board with thin glass stones direct from Japan was $9 including sea-mail shipping. In January 1967 £1 was $2.4

It is possible that there was another source and that is what your board came from - I am guessing that Jon Diamond and I would have gone for boards that we could get quickly, rather than wait 3 months to arrive from Japan.

Hello again. Indeed, and I suspect these were of local make, not Japanese.

I have to say that I thought the Go Society was CUGOS rather than CUGS - but it's too long ago now to be sure.

I always preferred CUGS: sorry. Anyway the marking on the back doesn't have to be contemporary with the purchase of the boards. It's the sort of precaution you'd take when bringing equipment to a tournament. And the fact that they are light, non-folding also suggests a batch made so a tournament can be run.

Possibly the old BGJ has some clue. And could shoot down my theory.

[bogiesan]

Diversionary post:

David Brin’s 1993 science fiction story “Glory Season” was my introduction to the Game of Life and some Of its variations. Back then, I found a Macintosh program — that I believe ran in Ye Olde HyperCard — that could be set up from a menu of objects and then allowed to run for a predetermined number of generations. The idea, IIRC, was to end up with a predictable monochromatic image of, say, a tree or smiley face.
UPDATE:
I just climbed back out of the rabbit hole Mr Matthews’ post sent me down, an hour or so of google deadends and epiphanies. I could find no reference to an ancient HyerCard stack for Life but I found several hooks to early applications for Macs back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Plenty of fun resources to explore and some apps to download for many platforms and you can visit web-based Life interfaces.

http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/

http://golly.sourceforge.net/

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questio ... ays-game-o

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26608/my-game-of-life

[mumps]

It looks like something we did have at the time.

I confess I can't remember whether they were a local acquisition or whether we purchased them from Japan.

The quality suggests local, but I can't recall who might have got them produced. Maybe Francis Roads, Tony Atkins or Toby Manning knows?

[mumps]

Well, some research in the BGJ suggests that this board may be one of the ones for sale in Spring 1969: thin plywood board and good plastic stones from the BGA cost 36/-

The December 1969 issue implies they were from Japan, so I guess the Nihon Kiin.

Jon

[Charles Matthews]

Well, some research in the BGJ suggests that this board may be one of the ones for sale in Spring 1969: thin plywood board and good plastic stones from the BGA cost 36/-

The December 1969 issue implies they were from Japan, so I guess the Nihon Kiin.

Jon

Excellent! Just in time to back up my theory, I would say. Thanks Jon.

[Bonobo]

Apropos Conway … you might appreciate this article:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-con ... -20150828/

A Life in Games
John Horton Conway claims to have never worked a day in his life. This adaptation from the biography Genius at Play shows how serious advances such as the surreal numbers can spring out of fun and games.
[…]
Conway’s contributions to the mathematical canon include innumerable games. He is perhaps most famous for inventing the Game of Life in the late 1960s. The Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner called it “Conway’s most famous brainchild.” This is not Life the family board game, but Life the cellular automaton. A cellular automaton is a little machine with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration in discrete rather than continuous time — in seconds, say, each tick of the clock advances the next iteration, and over time, behaving a bit like a transformer or a shape-shifter, the cells evolve into something, anything, everything else. Life is played on a grid, like tic-tac-toe, where its proliferating cells resemble skittering microorganisms viewed under a microscope.
[…]

Long read, nice read, and not only about the Game of Life.

[Charles Matthews]

The article is mostly gossip, familiar to me from my time in DPMMS. The Cambridge Go Society was founded in 1965. Conway used to read the works of Euler, and there is some of Euler's facility in his approach. He was a doctoral student of Harold Davenport, and started off on a quantitative problem in the Hardy-Littlewood circle method.

As far as go is concerned, the way the board position breaks up into separate "games" in the endgame was the major input into Conway's idea of disjunctive games: which led to ONAG and then Winning Ways. I don't believe he played much go at all. Games were there to be studied, particularly for their hidden secrets.

[tj86430]

https://www.golem.de/news/covid-19-math ... 47842.html

[Bonobo]

https://www.golem.de/news/covid-19-mathematiker-john-conway-ist-gestorben-2004-147842.html

Oh damn, yet another CoViD-19 victim

[Charles Matthews]

A prolific guy, who cared about a range of topics quite different from those that typically concern professional mathematicians.

[Uberdude]

A lecture from Conway on surreal numbers with an intro on how watching people playing Go in the maths department inspired him. He mentions the British champion bringing a board along, presumably you Jon?