Brian came in from Canada and had to go through the Homeland Security folks to enter the country. They asked him what he was coming here for and he told them he was going to a conference about "A New Kind of Science". And the HS folks wanted to know what was wrong with "the old kind" of science...
As many people, he got into CA's through the Game of Life, but his main field of activity has always been educational software.
Brian talked about the early history of research on cellular automata and the way it was intertwined with recreational math - from von Neumann to John Conway to MIT hackers.
He then showed us how we can use the Game of Life to build an actual circuit in a rule named Wiredworld, starting from signals, going over to inverters, gates, circuits, up to a fully fledged program to generate prime numbers.
In the Q&A section Stephen Wolfram talked about the early history of the game of life - it seems that von Neumann had been inspired while Conway was actually trying to find a convenient enumeration scheme for recursive functions.
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