Inventing Game of Life (John Conway) - Numberphile

May he rest in peace a true genius of this century.

He died today, 11th of April 2020. Rest in peace.

"The one thing I'd really like to know before I die is-" NOOOOOOOOOOOOO... 11:02

LOL he's like a musical artist that is sick of playing his biggest hit at every concert!

R.I.P. John Horton Conway, born 26 December 1937, died of COVID-19 on 11 April 2020 (aged 82).

Brady, you sadist editor.

I don’t know why I have tears in my eyes about this man. But I guess I never realized how inspired I was by him Rest In Peace

"If you couldn't predict what it did, then probably that's because it was capable of doing anything." <3

Wow. I'm amazed that Conway doesn't find his work all that extensible. I was initially inspired by a demonstration of the Game of Life on The Screen Savers when I was a kid. I based my undergraduate thesis on emergent complexity (using the Game of Life as an example) as applied to philosophy of mind and the Hard Problem. I based a lot of my graduate work in law and mind sciences on it, too. I've used Conway's Game of Life as a proof for emergent complexity, and applied the concept to numerous disciplines. Very sad that he doesn't see the value of it.

What I liked about this video was the background: the fact that the invention of the Game of Life was very deliberate, and came from thinking abstractly about what you would need to sustain life on other planets. I didn't know that John von Neumann had already invented a similar complex system with 29 states. I'm sorry Conway was so ambivalent about the Game of Life. I totally get it, because to him the game was just a simplification, a demonstration of a principle that someone else had already discovered. It's not his own discovery and so he couldn't get very enthusiastic about it. There are other things he would rather be known for: the surreal numbers, the Conway simple groups, the 15 theorem and the 290 theorem, for example. But he doesn't quite grasp that discovery is not the only way you can contribute to the world. Sometimes taking someone else's discovery, revealing its bare essentials and making it accessible to millions of people IS an actual breakthrough.

I remember seeing this a few months ago, I'm coming back to pay respects to this brilliant mind. Rest in peace.

The one thing I'd really like to know before I die is the one thing he'd really like to know before he dies.

Dude, you got to interview Conway? What, an honor.

Brady, I listened to your podcast about the comments system, but I forget if you mentioned if you still peruse the comments anyway. Here's my two cents: These video's are astonishingly good. You have introduced me and millions of others to thinkers and ways of thinking that would have been otherwise nonexistent to us. These ways of thinking will influence me for the rest of my life. Thank you.

Imagine doing all this work before computers. The imagination one must have. Simply genius.

i get sad when one of the 2x2 squares die :(

"The one thing I'd really like to know before I die is to understand why the monster group exists" :) FTFY RIP you legend!

Oh wow, that last second XD What a tease!

Jacob Grimm was an extraordinarily important linguist and anthropologist, mostly remembered for collecting and rewriting a series of fairy tales, J.R.R. Tolkien was a linguist and English language teacher for most of his life, he is best remembered for the Middle Earth series, and the're not even the only ones, we unfortunately don't choose what we are remembered for, Just look at Fermat, remembered for one theorem, out of hundreds, all being nothing more then his hobby.

I feel special when i watch this