cellular automata

> Boy, thanks for that! The funny thing, when I read about the
> Wolfram book and the basic thrust, was that *I* became
> fascinated with Conway's "Life" when it was originally
> published in Scientific American. I was a senior in high
> school, vacilating between music and a life in biology, and I
> even built myself a "Life" board (waaaaay pre-computer) to
> watch it work.
>
> I programmed "Life" a couple of times later when I ended up
> working on a software engineering degree.
>
> And everyone thinks I just bang on drums...
>
> Cheers,
> Jon

Yes, the Wolfram article brought up reminescing to me
too -- when I was a wee lad I wanted a faster life than
the one I had in BASIC, so I made a version that did
its calculations directly to the screen refresh memory,
which was a lot faster than using a 2D array in Atari
BASIC. I calculated the number of neighbors for each
cell in-place as one of 9 shades of grey -- the result
was very pretty cloud like images that shifted and
swirled about which I prefered greatly to the
monochomatic images of the original. I called the
program "Clouds -- Shadows of Life".

As another Life story, when I wrote the VLIW compiler
for my first Digital Synthesis Engine ASIC, it was
hosted in Win95 and so it was my first 95 app. The
Watcom compiler came with a neat Life example App and I
used it as a base to write the interactive graphical
compiler on top of, and then put a scriptable effects
engine on top of the compiler which I used to implement
the multichannel effects the chip supported. Fun! For
almost a year that complier was called "Life", but
eventually changed the name since people were getting
confused.

- Jeff