"Father of the Game of Life" dies due to new crown pneumonia, reviewing the life of a math puck

Author | Nian Suqing

Editor-in-Chief | Wu Xingling

Produced | Program Life (ID: coder_life)

Princeton University professor David Sperger announced on Twitter that Princeton University mathematics professor John Horton Conway died of new coronary pneumonia on April 11 at the age of 83 .

Born in Liverpool, England in 1937, Conway was a very accomplished mathematician. He has been active in the fields of research on finite groups, interesting mathematics, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory, and coding. His death is no doubt. It's a big loss in mathematics. In many posts commemorating Conway, some math enthusiasts said sadly: "Conway finally regretted losing his 'Game of Life'".

The most amazing mathematician in the world

Conway has shown a strong interest and talent in mathematics since he was a child. When he was four years old, his mother found that Conway could skillfully recite the second power.

When Conway was in high school, he wanted to become a "professor" in mathematics in Cambridge in the future. Sure enough, Conway was admitted to Cambridge University to study mathematics. After graduating from PhD, he worked as an assistant professor at Cambridge University for a period of time. Later, he entered Princeton University as Professor von Neumann.

Conway is probably the most interesting mathematician in the contemporary era. According to his own words, " I have never worked a day in this life, I have been playing" . His biography is called " The Show of Genius ".

Sir Michael Atiyah, the former president of the Royal Society, commented on him like this:

Conway is the most amazing mathematician in the world.

But Conway was once lost in confusion when he was young.

Conway, in his twenties, was obsessed with some special forms of interesting mathematics, but he also worried that other mathematicians would evaluate his research as "trivial." Ordinary and uncommon, this is a derogatory comment that you do not want to hear as a mathematician. Therefore, Conway has made no progress in research for a long time.

Fortunately, Conway soon realized that there are not many mathematicians in the world, so their evaluation is not as important as expected. In this case, why should you care about the evaluations of "not serious enough" and "ordinary and ordinary" given by others?

A few years later, Conway made a blockbuster with a paper on finite groups, which earned him a place in academia. After that, he decided to let himself go and give priority to researching the directions he was interested in. "Game of Life" is one of Conway's directions for thinking, but his research is far from this. In the same period when the game of life was invented, around 1970, Conway invented a number system that was later called "surreal numbers".

The advent of the surreal number itself is an event with a "surreal" color, so that many people at that time connected it with the "surrealist" art genre, but the two actually had no ties. After the establishment of digital systems such as complex numbers and hyper-complex numbers (such as quaternions), the mathematics community has long believed that the development of digital systems has basically come to an end. And Conway's discovery can be described as thunder in silence.

Even more amazing than the invention of surreal numbers itself, Conway ’s original purpose was not to develop a new number system, but to study an ancient game from the East, Go. Conway accidentally came into contact with Go during his studies and work at Cambridge University and was deeply involved in it.

According to the book "Mathematics" published by Cambridge University in 1985, during the creation of the game of life, Conway worked with the graduate students around him , writing acres of draft paper on one side and playing cards and coins on the other , Shells, go pieces until they find out the rules of the game that can balance life and death.

Doomsday rules and quantum mechanics

The way Conway studied mathematics was to design a variety of games, or re-enact boring games. Among the many games created by Conway, there is an algorithm called "The Doomsday Rule" that is relatively simple and easy to understand. The "end of the world" here does not refer to the end of the world, but if a date is randomly given, the day of the week is immediately calculated.

Conway has designed an algorithm for this, and it takes only 2 seconds of mental calculation to get the answer immediately. Conway marked Sunday to Saturday as 1-6, and then used a series of algorithms to find the "memory day" of the year, and then the "anchor point" of each month. The difference between the anchor point and the anchor point can be calculated. The day is the day of the week.

In order to exercise his ability to calculate the calendar, Conway even wrote a computer program and asked him the day of the week every time he logged on to the computer.

Indecision, quantum mechanics. This is a ridicule of quantum mechanics by many people.

Einstein believes that there is still some "hidden variable" behind quantum mechanics. This so-called "hidden variable" is certain.

Numerous experiments afterwards proved that Einstein was wrong. Conway used mathematical methods to prove the so-called free will theorem, that is, "if human behavior (mainly referring to the measurement behavior in experiments) does not meet determinism ie our choice is not entirely a prediction of a function of past information Value, then under certain assumptions of relativity and quantum mechanics, the behavior of elementary particles is also inconsistent with determinism ", again demonstrating that" the hidden variable does not exist ". The free will theorem states that the measurement results of quantum mechanics cannot be determined by any method before the experiment.

Conway concluded: "If the experimenter has free will, so are the elementary particles."

What is a "life game"?

Throughout his life, Conway's achievements are far beyond this. He has achieved outstanding achievements in geometry, topology, and number theory. The most famous of them is the cellular automata he invented, also known as "the game of life." .

In 1970, Conway in "Scientific American " on this game published shortly, and immediately attracted the attention of British and American mathematicians and computer experts. Many scientists around the world have seriously studied this problem, and have published many papers to explore this game. This game is what many hackers can't put it down. It is called "hacker's toy" and occupies a quarter of the computer at one time.

Although Conway was hailed as "the father of the game of life", but many years later, when Conway talked about it again, he actually said that he "hated the game of life" because "the game of life is too famous and obscured my other achievements. ".

Cellular automata was originally intended to provide a powerful method model for simulating complex phenomena including self-organizing structures. The basic idea of this model is that many complex structures and processes in nature are, in the final analysis, only composed of a large number of basic units The simple interaction caused by von Neumann first proposed. In the late 1940s, Neumann began to dabble in cellular automata theory, general logic theory, and self-replicating systems. He deeply compared natural automata and artificial automata, and left a manuscript "Computer and Human Brain" before his death.

Later, Conway continued to study on this basis, and invented the program to realize cellular automata-the game of life.

If it is said that Neumann ’s research is biased towards theory, it is difficult for the average person to understand. Conway ’s “game of life” makes the automata theory grounded, so that people other than research scholars in related fields can understand the mystery.

The interface of the game is a two-dimensional rectangle, and each cell in the matrix has a living or dead cell. The survival of these cells follows a certain rule: the life and death of each cell at the next moment depends on the number of living or dead cells in the adjacent eight squares. If there are too many cells surviving in the adjacent square, then this cell will die at the next moment due to lack of resources. If there are too few cells surviving around, then this cell will also die due to isolation.

in particular:

If the current cell is a living cell:

If there are two or three living cells around, the next generation, the cell is still alive;

If there are less than two living cells around, the cell will die from isolation;

If there are more than three living cells around, the cell will die from crowding.

If the current cell is a dead cell:

If there are exactly three living cells around, the next generation, the living cells will multiply to that cell.

In the course of the game, the disordered cells will gradually evolve a variety of wonderful structures with different shapes. These structures often have good symmetry, and each generation of cells is constantly changing shape. Among them, some shapes have been locked and will not change from generation to generation, but they will be destroyed by the "invasion" of some disordered cells. However, shape and order can often arise from clutter. The generated shape and order are called "pattern", also called "creature".

Friends who want to experience can click: https://playgameoflife.com/

This is a zero-player game. There is no competition among game players, and no wins or losses. The true meaning of the game of life is to let "simulated creatures" experience survival and death on the computer, simulate the basic process of the reproduction and evolution of life, and through the computer simulation, explore the life conditions under certain rules, the starting conditions and the final events to the final result. influences. Many researchers even believe that this Conway game of life can explain many grand questions about life and the universe.

The Sri Lankan is dead, I hope Professor Conway can continue to study his math games in another world.

Reference link:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av25778414/

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%94%9F%E5%91%BD%E6%B8%B8%E6%88%8F/2926434?fr=aladdin

https://game.china.com/industry/focus/11118308/20200413/38064631_1.html

https://www.zhihu.com/question/387110069/answer/1150488277