Conway's Game of Life: Difference between revisions

First published in October 1970 by [[wikipedia:Martin Gardner|Martin Gardner]] in Scientific American<ref>Gardner, Martin (October 1970). "Mathematical Games – The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life"". Scientific American. 223 (4): 120–123.</ref>, Conway's Game of Life quickly became a popular target of APL implementation. Jean Jacques Duby's 7-line interactive implementation appeared in [[APL Quote Quad]] exactly a year later<ref>Jean Jacques Duby. "Conway's Game "Life"", '''APL Quote Quad''' Vol. III No. 2 & 3. 1971-10-01.</ref>, and was followed by a 9-line implementation in February 1972<ref>Bruce A. Beebe. "Life". '''APL Quote Quad''' Vol III No. 4. 1972-02-10</ref> and both a 6-line and a 4-line implementation in June 1972<ref>W. J. Jones, "Game of Life" and D. A. Bonyun, "Game of Life". '''APL Quote Quad''' Vol III No. 5. 1972-06-05</ref>.

A survey of previous APL implementations as well as a new 23-token implementation was given by [[Eugene McDonnell]] in "Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short", published in the [[APL88]] conference proceedings.<ref>[[Eugene McDonnell|McDonnell, Eugene]]. [https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/eem/life.htm "Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short"]. APL88 Conference Proceedings, '''APL Quote-Quad''' Vol. 18 No. 2, 1987-12.</ref> McDonnell also described how future language features, such as the [[Commute]] operator and a tesselation operator related to [[Cut operator|Cut]] and the much later [[Stencil]], might reduce this to as few as 11 tokens (one of which is a long list of integers), or to 9 tokens when using a pre-defined vector of matrices.