>>Hey Folks,
>>
>>Was reading a book the other day where they mentioned the old mathematical game of Life. This game was written by a mathematician in 1970 to demonstrate that a simple set of rules can generate complex and unpredicatable results over time.
>>
>>Over 20 years ago, I wrote an Apple program to run this simulation or game or whatever you want to call it. Sure enough, wondrous things happen over time if you start with interesting patterns.
>>
>>Anyhow, I wrote a Life application for VFP this morning and posted it here. It's called VFPLife. You can put this in the "Bag O Tricks" category: this application does nothing useful. However, you can spend hours and hours trying new patterns and seeing how many cycles it takes to population stasis or death or ... never-ending diversity?
>>
>>The penultimate nerd game.....ENJOY!
>
>Hi John,
>
>I think the game of Life was the invention of Prof. Edward Fredkin, who was my thesis advisor. Here's another toy you might find amusing: http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/index.htm. I wish I had the time to play with your creation, but the IRS currently has my (almost) full attention. Thanks for giving renewed life to the game of Life!
>
>Mike

I found that I was mistaken about Edward Fredkin's connection to the Game of Life, so I'd like to set the record straight: it was John Horton Conway who invented the Game of Life around 1970.

According to http://www2.ics.hawaii.edu/~sugihara/course/ics311s97/swda/assignment.html, Von Neumann established the theory of cellular automata in 1947. The initial work on infinitely growing patterns was initiated by G. A. Moore of the National Bureau of Standards in the late 1950s and continued by Edward Fredkin of MIT and S. M. Ulam of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the early 1960s.

Edward Fredkin was the Director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science from 1971 to 1974. To quote further from the preceding source:

"Initially, it was assumed by Conway that his transition rules always led to eventual stability. However, in late 1971, within a few months of his initial invention, researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT discovered a ``glider gun.'' It is a configuration of live cells which every 30 steps spontaneously generates a group of cells that departs from the main group of live cells in the northeast direction. The existence of such patterns demonstrated that Conway's rules lead to continuous growth for certain initial configurations.

A further discovery was made at the same time that a ``glider shuttle'' could be constructed. The shuttle consists of a single glider and two pentadecthalons wherein the pentadecthalon towards which the glider is traveling expands, captures the glider, and redirects it back to the other pentadecthalon in a periodic manner. These and other surprising discoveries caused an immense effort to be expended upon Conway's Life in the early 1970s at dozens of universities and industrial laboratories. In addition to exploration of Conway's Life, a number of sets of transition rules were proposed and found to be interesting. ... For example, Edward Fredkin of MIT found the life form in which a cell follows the parity of its 4 neighbors. ..."

Fredkin discovered a number of rules for generating self-replicating Life patterns, but more notably, Fredkin is credited with pioneering the field of "Digital Physics". In 1982 Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli published "Conservative Logic" (Internat. J. Theoret. Phys.), describing a billiard ball model of computation and the now famous Fredkin gate, which can serve as a universal basis for reversible computation. Fredkin's work was a significant influence on Richard Feynman's explorations into the field of Quantum Computing (not to be confused with the infamous "Quantum Buffering" we've been hearing about lately).

Danny Hillis wrote a great article for Physics Today, "Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine", which you can see at: http://www.longnow.org/about/articles/ArtFeynman.html. (Hillis says the first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.)

The following is an excerpt from "Commentary on The Finite Nature Hypothesis of Edward Fredkin" by Ross Rhodes (see http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/finite-all.html):

In 1992, Edward Fredkin published two papers which are the indispensible shots-accross-the bow in understanding the universe in which we live as an artifact produced by programming on a computer. An earlier profile of Fredkin published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1988 had stated the gist of Fredkin's thinking on the subject. The article had noted that many of Fredkin's ideas about physics and computing were acceptable to the scientific community, but his conclusions were not considered to be within the realm of science. "If Fredkin ... stopped at saying that the universe operates as if it were a computer, he could improve his stature among physicists...."[1] Fortunately for the rest of us, he did not stop there: the universe operates as if it were a computer because it is a computer.

References to the aforementioned articles:

FINITE NATURE: http://www.im.lcs.mit.edu/poc/fredkin/Finite-Nature
A NEW COSMOGONY: http://www.im.lcs.mit.edu/poc/fredkin/New-Cosmogony

More random Fredkin tidbits:

Fredkin authored ``Trie memory'' in Communications of the ACM, 3 (1960), 490-499

He lives on a Carribean island he bought using the money he made on desalinization technology.

Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky invented The Muse: a music composer machine or digital synthesizer and melody composer, involving early logic modules in a unique circuit that allows the possibility of 14 trillion musical note combinations. Manufactured by Triadex Inc., it originally sold for $249 in 1971.

In 1980, Fredkin established a three-tiered prize at Carnegie Mellon to encourage research in computer chess. The final tier of that prize--$100,000-- was awarded to a team from IBM in 1997 for developing a machine that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

Robert Wright wrote a book called Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (1988), which looks at the theories of digital physicist Edward Fredkin, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, and Kenneth Boulding and suggests a synthesis of their ideas. A New York Times review of this book is available at: http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/reviews.wright.html.

Some Famous Fredkin Quotes:

"There are three great events in history. One, the creation of the universe. Two, the appearance of life. The third one, which I think is equal in importance, is the appearance of artificial intelligence. This is a form of life that is very different, and that has possibilities for intellectual achievement that are hard for us to imagine. These machines will evolve: some intelligent computers will design others, and they'll get to be smarter and smarter. The question is, where will that leave us? It's fairly difficult to imagine how you can have a machine that's millions of times smarter than the smartest person and yet is really our slave, doing what we want. They may condescend to talk to us, they may play games that we like to play, and in some sense, they might keep us as pets."

"The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them -- no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less. (Edward Fredkin's Paradox)