Coyote_Blues

Seconded. Having worked in a haunted house myself, you know where the jump scares are, you're watching for the pop doors, and you know nobody can touch you. I just go through to admire the props, scenery, and animatronics.

What's your take on angry drunks taking a swing at you for scaring them? Press charges or no? I didn't get hit, and I preferred to stay in character, and his buddies dragged him off before he could take another.

Man, this brings back memories of programming in college; my version of Conway's Game of Life programming assignment had to be done in Modula-2 (a Pascal variant).

Do you feel that the programming software and hardware capabilities available now make it easier to explore Life in other permutations? And if the answer is yes, would you have implemented the original version differently if you and your partner had discovered it today?

(I hope that comes across the right way. My discipline in college was computing languages, and I'm always fixated on syntactic differences and advantages.)

<shudders in remembrance> Yes indeed; I was one of those people! I had a graph pad full of possible states and next generation steps in order to visualize results, because I was programming ASCII output... and our goal was to come up with a program that would survive 1000 generations as a black box for a pattern our instructor would test with it without falling into a static state. (the answer he was looking for was to make the grid big enough so his gliders wouldn't fall off the edge, but my solution was to make it so anything going off the edge wrapped around the other side.)

We didn't have access to the web like we do today, so there was no searching for likeminded folks out there who could help out with their patterns or algorithms.

(It's interesting the way the mentality of programming projects has changed in such a short time; I mentor people who are struggling with programming and they're very much into trying to kitbash together someone else's code that's out there instead of understanding the algorithms by starting from scratch.)

Peeked at the book - looks interesting and I'll give it a better look later! Thank you for doing this!