Life Is Just A Big Math Problem
Back in 1985, I took my first computer science course at MIT. We had spent the whole term discussing concepts borne completely in text, numbers, and punctuation marks.
I was so hungry to see something visual. Perhaps it’s because I was one of a handful of freshmen who had brought the new Apple Macintosh computer to campus — and was made fun of because it had pictures on the screen rather than just text. To the upperclassmen and my peers, it all seemed terribly unnecessary.
But then there was a special presentation toward the end of term, where the brilliant, gnome-like instructor, Professor Hal Abelson, slightly aged and slightly balding, figuratively let down his hair. Having a computer science professor with a name reminiscent of the “Hal” computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey always got me in an excited mood for the future. Hal took us through some new animated visualizations of The Game of Life as rendered onto a videotape by a colleague of his. Naturally for all of us who grew up on Milton Bradley games, we leaned in excitedly to see our favorite family game being played on the computer.
