I for one. I'm a software engineer, and I'm driven by curiosity. In the 90's I was privileged to belong to a private mailing list that included the likes of John Conway and Bill Gosper and we shared our discoveries in Life and a few other CA. I shared with them my CA discovery that John named "HighLife" and we had some fun with the simple replicator that it supports. Good times.

[edit] Someone put a nice animation of the replicator here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighLife

You make me a bit jealous, rubbing shoulders with Conway and Gosper. Martin Gardner's October 1970 column in SciAm introduced me to cellular automata, and I spent a few hours meticulously tracking generations on a checkerboard before it occurred to me that the university's IBM 1130 was probably better than I was at that sort of thing. Soon friends and I were writing competing Fortran programs for that 1130, monopolizing it all night every night, calculating Life.

I corresponded with Gardner once or twice, and subscribed to Robert T. Wainwright's Lifeline newsletter, which had begun a taxonomy of Life objects and reported community progress. Our little group was surprisingly competitive in the beginning, considering the limited resources at our backwater university, but when the MIT group kicked into high gear the exploits of Gosper, Woods and others at MIT were simply mind blowing. Woods' Atavist backtracker, Gosper's Glider Gun, the first discovery of a Garden-of-Eden configuration... who could compete with that? And Gosper continued to amaze with his astonishing Breeder.

Conway's GoL inspired other acquaintances, electrical engineers. One of them built a special-purpose computer to compute generations; he'd have surprised to know then that the computer was Turing-complete. Another EE pal built a crude raster display for the lab's Nova 1220 mini, with the specific intent to display GoL generations. Hardly such a thing as glass TTYs in those days, kids.

Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.

> Sorry for the free-association; you know how old guys get. Think I've still got my old stack of Lifelines around, stored in the garage. Maybe I'll haul 'em out like an old yearbook, and see how they go with a Stone Levitation.

Scan them! And drink, the Stone, of course.

I see that they've been preserved elsewhere: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Lifeline

Put plainly by Wikipedia[1]:

Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. It is interesting for computer scientists, physicists, biologists, biochemists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, generative scientists and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that "design" and "organization" can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway's Life "universe" extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.

If you go deep enough, it really is a fascinating thing. Even more-so given the extreme simplicity of its rules.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life#Origins

I have always been fascinated with cellular automata. I think they serve a really good purpose in being a "fun" way to approach complexity and it's consequences and I spent more than a few hours playing with game of life programs especially when I was younger.

But I am still curious as to who has the time to engineer with them? Is it just "hobbyists" or do some academics derive useful work out from pursuing them?

One thing that may be worth pointing out is that the hobbyists do not engineer their Life systems by sitting in front of a grid and clicking one square at a time. A large bank of off-the-shelf technologies has been built. Building something large like this life simulator is not trivial, but it's not as hard as it looks, either. You're sort of seeing the machine language view of a program built with a lot of advanced C++. The effort to build is a lot less than a casual perusal of the machine language may indicate. (Though I still respect them for it.)

> Is it just "hobbyists" or do some academics derive useful work out from pursuing them?

The excessive search for "useful work" is one of the bigger problem of academia today. Even the most practical research usually doesn't look useful at the beginning, and pursuing things that seem immediately applicable to real-world problems can be a form of premature optimization. Not to say we shouldn't pursue the "practicality" route at all, but today most research seems to be optimized for short-term money generation and/or fame.

Anyway, cellular automata are a separate research field, and I'm pretty sure that some of those game-of-life engineers are academics who are doing this as research because it's fun/interesting. And hail to them, because those hobbyst-scientists create tools that enterpreneurs can forge progress with.

It's not Conways life, but biologists use cellular automata as models to show that simple rules can create such things as a zebra's stripes, a leopard's spots, the competition between bacterial colonies, development of the human brain, etc. Google "cellular automata in biology" for examples (the first hit I got is http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/pubs/jtb_ca.pdf. Twenty years old, but to my outsider's eye, it appears to be a decent overview)

I did simulations of spread of fire and smoke inside buildings with cellular automata for my BSc. CA's have lots of interesting applications in many different domains, even not related to science itself.

I play with them often. It serves a purpose, and in that sense, it helps you define some part of your reality. Anti-gliders are the fun :D

Wolfram thinks he do.

> complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules... "design" and "organization" can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer

Self-organization is fascinating stuff; I suppose the economic corollary would be the "invisible hand." But in this example, is there not a "designer" setting the "simple rules" that make the self-organization possible?

Even from a random starting pattern you will get some complex patterns emerging.

And no, those aren't encoded in Life's rules. They are merely allowed by those.

The most common patterns all have names, just because it's so much easier to talk about a "loaf" than "you know, the sort of triangular one with the corners missing". This page shows the relative frequency of a kind of pattern called "still lifes" http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes but most of the pages linked from there are auto-generated stubs. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Loaf

Edit: You're right, people put a lot of time into discovering and engineering things in Life. But it's an odd mix of cleverness and brute-forcing. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis