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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Scientific American
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2024 03:17:38 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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That was a cool magazine. Martin Gardner’s maths column was how most 
people discovered Conway’s “Game Of Life”, back in the day.

Back when computers were scarce and expensive, MIT, I think it was, was 
able to devote a lot of computing time to messing around with cellular 
automata (purely in aid of research, of course), and discovering lots of 
remarkable things like “spaceships” and “glider guns”. And conjecturing 
about “Garden of Eden” patterns (board configurations which could not be 
produced as the immediate descendant of any possible prior configuration).