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...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 by three-no more, no fewer-counters on neighboring squares will yield a new counter in the next move...
Though Life is rewarding enough when played manually, it takes on an added dimension when played on the computer, which causes the varied patterns to unfold much more rapidly. The computer can either place the counters at random or follow the operator's placement instructions. Readily programmed to obey Life's rules, it can then perform the necessary calculations in a flash and display the changing patterns on a cathode ray tube, providing a remarkable kaleidoscopic show. Sometimes the counters quickly settle into what Conway calls "still lifes" - stable, unchanging figures, including those known in the game...
These ideas received immediate recognition. Life magazine in 1968 ran a cover story on the "Psychobiology of Violence" which described the work of the doctors and praised psychosurgery as a possible cure to random violence in the streets. When the three doctors went to the National Institute of Mental Health for money to set up a "violence unit" at Boston City Hospital, they were at first turned down. William Sweet then applied to Elliot L. Richardson '41, then Secretary of HEW, who had discussed the violence project with him when Richardson had been attorney general of Massachusetts. Richardson put pressure...
...pages. Random House...
MYTH by Brian O'Doherty. 288 pages. Random House. $25. "Between an artist and his work on the one hand, and the audience on the other," notes Critic Brian O'Doherty, "there are large areas for misunderstanding." O'Doherty, who paints (under the name Patrick Ireland) and also teaches (at Barnard), attempts to correct any such misunderstandings about eight American artists: Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth and Joseph Cornell. Despite the use of a good deal of jargon, O'Doherty is remarkably successful. His interviews...