#john conway

[the-most-sublime-fool]

how precious is this little deinonychus by australian paleoartist john conway!!!

[the-most-sublime-fool]

Megalodon by John Conway

[periaptgames]

Conway's Game Of Law

Organisations which design systems will produce

(a) designs that duplicate the communication structures of the organisation, and

(b) 'gliders' and 'blinkers' and 'pulsars' and then you get those sudden weird patterns that reset almost the whole board

[mathhombre]

Gosper Gun

Story from Allan Wechsler on the Math-Fun list:

"I don't know if the story has gotten lost, but Gosper described to me pretty much exactly what he did to find the glider gun. He went into it pretty much knowing what he was looking for, had a well-defined plan of attack, and it worked.

The genesis of the idea was a pattern called a queen bee, which takes fifteen generations to blop down a beehive on one side and then turn around. In the next fifteen generations it lays another beehive on the other side, and turns around again. The next time it tries to deposit a beehive, it fails because there is already a beehive there, and the resulting explosion stops the oscillation.

A block can be positioned so that it eats the beehives that the queen bee produces on one side. If you put such a block on both sides, you create a stable period-30 oscillator called a queen bee shuttle.

Gosper's idea was to position two queen bees so that they would each try to create a beehive, from opposite sides. Suppressor blocks were placed on the *outside, (*so that the pattern would look like: Block Queenbee Interaction-area Queenbee Block.) There were a few dozen relative placements of the two queen bees such that the beehives they placed in the interaction area would, in fact, interact, and about fifteen possible phase-differences between the two queen bees. So there was a search space of several hundred possibilities, and in most of them the colliding beehive-embryos would explode and destroy the pattern, and in some they would just die (creating an interesting new p-30 oscillator). Gosper's hope was that one of the arrangements would create debris that would spawn one glider and then die before the next queen bee started dropping cruft in the interaction area. Small patterns that produce one glider and then die are fairly common, so Gosper had good reason to expect success, and sure enough, the Gosper gun was discovered.

I do not know if that search space was ever exhausted -- maybe Gosper just stopped looking after finding the gun. There's another search space, of similar size, where the two queen bees have axes at right angles to each other rather than parallel. I don't know if that one was ever searched. Probably both have been."

[gondolend]

Image by John Conway.

I don't have any problem with Velociraptor, in fact I happen to think dromaeosaurs are (well, were) very interesting animals, but I hate the popular perception of them as these highly intelligent, lightning-fast death machines thanks to movies like Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park I love you, but god dammit.

So for Gondolend, I deliberately set out to portray its Velociraptor in the most non-threatening, non-badass way possible, which is why Gina punts one like a football in that excerpt up there. In general, throughout its range in Gondolendia Velociraptor is considered an annoying pest and a threat to livestock, and in some areas its local name also doubles as an insult.

Also since Mongolia does not exist in Gondolend I couldn't have it be V. mongoliensis, so I took it and V. osmolskae, added some fictional species, and for reasons that I have long since forgotten named them all after the guys in Monty Python. (Velociraptor chapmani was sadly extinct, having been wiped out through overhunting.)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

nailed it

* * *

“Each person is the missing piece in this wacky world.” - John Conway

[All Channels Archive]

[know-o-princess]

One idea I had for Erud is that some of its fauna are based on various cryptids and mythological critters, and I really liked the Cryptozoologicon's interpretation of the Indonesian Ahool as a weird giant bat:

(Image by John Conway.)

I don't want to just rip that off though, so I thought: what if, instead of a bat, it was a giant derived scansoriopterygid?

(Image also by John Conway.)

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up | Quanta Magazine

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conj

What if a pyramid was, in fact, a cat?

"The great mathematician John Conway was interested not only in how tetrahedra can be arranged or rearranged, but also in how they balance. In 1966, he and the mathematician Richard Guy asked whether it was possible to construct a tetrahedron made of a uniform material — with its weight evenly distributed — that can only sit on one of its faces. If you were to place such a “monostable” shape on any of its other faces, it would always flip to its stable side." "In 2023, Domokos — along with his graduate students Gergő Almádi and Krisztina Regős, and Robert Dawson(opens a new tab) of Saint Mary’s University in Canada — proved that it is indeed possible to distribute a tetrahedron’s weight so that it will sit on just one face. At least in theory." - Elsie Cutts, Quanta Magazine