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Invented in 1970 by a Cambridge University mathematician named John Horton Conway and popularized by Mathematical Games Expert Martin Gardner in the pages of Scientific American, Life is a kind of solitaire played by one person on a checkerboard or graph paper, or indeed any gridlike field that contains adjoining squares of equal size. The playing pieces, or counters, are chips (any number) that are placed at random on squares across the board. They are then manipulated by what Conway calls his three "genetic laws"-for birth, death and survival. Under the Law of Birth, each empty square adjoined...
Countless computers from Cambridge to M.I.T. to Caltech have been programmed to play Life, sometimes to the chagrin of those in charge of the costly machines. Martin Gardner tells of one computer specialist who has a special panic button under his desk: whenever a supervisor comes into the room, the specialist can wipe the display screen clean; later, after the supervisor has left, the computer can reach into its memory and pick up the game exactly where it left off. Nor are Americans or Britons the only ones addicted. Gardner has gotten inquiries about Life from...
...JOHN GARDNER...
...days are fear of banality and a horror of sentiment. However skillfully they are written, there is often not enough at stake in contemporary novels to keep the mind and heart alive. Two of the most encouraging exceptions this year were John Leonard's Black Conceit and John Gardner's Nickel Mountain. The two books are also in a sense contrapuntal. In one, reality destroys illusion. In the other, illusion is accepted as a means of protecting love...
...P.P.G.'s job, says Cutler, should be limited to investigating and prosecuting "charges involving official misconduct and campaign law violations" by the Administration. California Senator Alan Cranston is readying a bill incorporating many of Cutler's specifics. Common Cause's John Gardner has also supported the idea in speeches...