Re: Scientific American

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).