Nautilus

This Early Computer Was Based on a Urinal Flush Mechanism

John Horton Conway, a Fellow of the Royal Society who hails from Princeton via Cambridge, England, is notorious for many things—perhaps most for his promiscuous curiosity and his lifelong love affair with playing all manner of games.

He’s also celebrated for his Conway groups in mathematical symmetry, for his , and for inventing cellular automaton —though he’s gone off that game lately. He opened a talk at an artificial intelligence conference in New York City last summer with the booming confession:  I HATE LIFE!

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