The last time I saw John, he was talking at a Mathematical Sciences Research Institute donor dinner. I was audience filler, after consulting on "A Beautiful Mind". He was describing games from his book with Berlekamp, and needed some fresh meat to play him in front of everyone. No one budged. The director gave me a certain look, and I volunteered. One of those "sticks on paper" games that never interested me, I was slaughtered. It all went very fast, some in the audience thought I had actually won a game counted against me. I got the biggest laugh when trying to outrun a certian loss, I enlarged the game board.
>> Life ultimately became way too popular for Dr. Conway’s liking. Whenever the subject came up, he would bellow, “I hate Life!” But in his final years he learned to love Life again. He narrated a documentary, with the working title “Thoughts on Life,” by the Brooklyn-based mathematician and filmmaker Will Cavendish, exploring the deterministic Game of Life versus the Free Will Theorem, a result Dr. Conway proved with his Princeton colleague Simon Kochen.
“I used to go around saying, ‘I hate Life,’” Dr. Conway says in the film. “But then I was giving a lecture somewhere, and I was introduced as ‘John Conway, Creator of Life.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite a nice way to be known.’ So I stopped saying ‘I hate Life’ after that.” <<
