John Conway - The Game of Life and Set Theory

[@RandyH524]

RIP Dr. Conway. You will be sorely missed.

[@hanniffydinn6019]

RIP john Conway 😭🐯

[@lucianomoffatt2672]

I have a soft spot for his style... You cannot be that charming!!

[@Supware]

2:36 Conway: "...he's interested in packing other things..." *interviewer tries hard not to laugh*

[@reginaldanderson7896]

This guy is maybe the funniest person alive.

[@PhilBagels]

And now he and Tim are both dead.

[@ilikemitchhedberg]

57:39 Money!

[@jaminkortegard2185]

makin' it rain!

[@feelmehish8506]

John Conway is always like this. He always says "what am I going to say?" This is really frustrating to me because I'd love to know what brilliance he's about to impart and I feel I've been theived by the universe in him forgetting what he's about to say.

[@Quarky_]

I doubt he ever saw it as "imparting knowledge", as he has mentioned elsewhere, he is firmly in the camp who see Mathematics is something to be discovered. So whatever you think he might have "imparted" is out there, for you, or someone else to discover, and rediscover. That said, your phrasing somehow also conveys ownership of scientific ideas, that feels very troubling to me, and against the scientific spirit; probably not how someone should look at science, even if they are not a professional.

[@xanderlewis]

@@Quarky_ Calm down.

[@ericzenk4404]

54:42. JHC "I haven't told you how to add, and I don't think I shall, because life isn't long enough to tell you everything."

[@Psnym]

Life @31:15 Must be like the rock star with a lot of albums but everyone wants to hear the one hit from the 1970's

[@PopeLando]

"... and welcome to our series of great mathematicians talking to interviewers who look exactly like them..."

[@kaylebtennant3317]

underrated prof

[@wizardatmath]

Minute 1:27:15 on Napoleon's greatest contribution to mathematics. #teaching

[@timmy18135]

How do cooperative games work?

[@wizardatmath]

Minute 49:00. I want that wall 🙌

[@jonathonjubb6626]

Laid back? He was almost horizontal... Never looked like he would reach 80, never mind 100. Still, we miss him...

[@macicoinc9363]

Great comment

[@rbettsx]

I would dispute Conway's attitude to EPR, entanglement. Newton offered no solution to the instantaneous action at a distance of the gravitational 'force'. From the contradiction between that and Special Relativity, General Relativity was born. It was important *not* to accept Newton's mystery without question.

[@MrTwhispers]

I have to program this in C#. It's gonna be fun, but o' so challenging.

[@wurnotantmlb]

yes!!!!

[@wizardatmath]

Minute 57:05. I know I'll never find the construction of #pi in the #surrealnumber system 😏 #vanneumann

[@likebox2]

Kochen Specher's no-hidden-variable theorem was the direct descendant of Von Neumann's no-hidden-variables proof in the 1930s or 1940s, so the relationship to Von Neumann in the free-will business is direct. Both theorems don't prove as much as you would think, due to the example of Bohm's theory.

[@ilikemitchhedberg]

I hear that this only applies locally

[@Ibakecookiess]

I remember him talking about the Free Will theorem here, but now I can't find the spot. Does somebody know the minute?

[@timotheuspeter734]

Ibakecookiess 1:05:20

[@PedroTricking]

Thanks

[@lucassiccardi8764]

Why not being pre-determined is equated to having free will? Maybe the "free will theorem" is intended exactly to argue that it's silly to base the idea that humans have free will just on the fact that we're not pre-determined, since on the same ground one could argue that even particles have?

[@lucassiccardi8764]

Now that I watched the whole thing, I have to say that he probably really intended to equate not being pre-determined with having free agency. It's shocking how even great minds, if not philosophically inclined, come up with such reductive solutions to complex problems. A little Aristotle, a little Hegel, would have widened his horizons and would have made a better mathematician of him.

[@likebox2]

The Newtonian analogy is not apropos, because there is a 'mechanism' of sort in Newtonian gravitation, which is a locally propagating gravitational field between the Earth and the Sun. The philosophical problem people had with Newton's gravity is that it was between every pair of objects in the universe, instantaneously. So that if you simulate N Newtonian particles, you have to sum N(N-1)/2 forces over all pairs. This means that there is a wrong-scaling of the number of things at point x to determine the behavior of a particle at point x--- it seems to depend on an enormous number of things far away. In the limit of large N, the behavior of any particle depends on N positions of far-away particles, and this was problematic philosophically in 1680. The solution today is to have a local field. The local field only depends on the values nearby, and the result of the field propagation is to produce an effect which computes the effective sum of the positions of all the other particles. But the effects are retarded by finite-propagation speed, and there are gravitational waves, and there are quantum limitations which prevent you from using the gravitational field to precisely locate all the other objects in the universe. So the modern field picture does not involve an exact double-sum over particle pairs, and the information at x (while larger than the Newtonian information, as it includes the field configuration and gravitational waves and so on), has the right scaling--- the number of degrees of freedom in the gravitational field (naively) goes roughly as the volume in the field picture. The issue with hidden variables in quantum mechanics is similar, in that people identify a wrong scaling for the information to describe entangled quantum systems. The scaling law is even worse than in Newton, you need exponentially much information to specify a quantum state. So those who advocate hidden variables (at least in modern times) would like to produce this information from a more reasonable description with a smaller number of variables. The Bell theorem and similarly the Kochen-Specher theorem rule out local hidden variables. But there is a way out of locality provided by gravity, in that we know now that the field scaling is wrong and the number of degrees of freedom in gravity only go as the area of a region not as the volume, because there is a bound on the mass from forming black holes. The related holographic princple is a nonlocal reconstruction of space time. It is concievable that there is a holographic system of hidden variables which can reproduce quantum mechanics, although I don't claim I can do this personally, and I don't think anyone has a good model. But such a thing is not ruled out by naive arguments which overuse locality because locality is no longer an ingredient in the fundamental description of nature, since gravity is holographic.

[@pankajchowdhury]

Can give me reference on philosophical problems about Newtowian gravity around 1680?

[@georgecarr9561]

Do we have A.I. powerful, and well versed enough to act as a referee?

[@macicoinc9363]

Clearly not, considering it can barely add small numbers together. It’s going to be a while until it’s better than humans at refereeing. You essentially asked whether AI is powerful enough now to determine if a set of training data is labeled correctly.

[@JohnMAdams-nl9zt]

Is this supposed to be a von Neumann tribute, why does the host keep pushing it? Conway keeps saying nope, no real influence. Interviewer keeps asking how did von Neumann influence you.

[@sobeeaton5693]

That is called a cavil.

[@fubiao9149]

57:44 look at that, money😂

[@votlook]

53:51 the only mathematician with his own clothing line

[@sobeeaton5693]

A peerless raconteur.

[@TheWilddrummerdude]

"protein folding is part of life"

[@timmy18135]

So this would be the gunter interpretation of quantum

[@Tapecutter59]

~29:30, he says "it would have been so rude" (to correct Teller's obvious mistake). Why do we all play this silly game? I play the game too, but why is it rude to correct someone, why do we feel embarrassed rather than enlightened when we are corrected? Is it built in behaviour or is it leant?

[@EarlZachary]

Teller's alleged mistake, "There were no children.", may have been technically true; perhaps when Teller knew Von Neumann the latter had no children.

[@jaminkortegard2185]

It's learned behavior based on social fear. People generally don't want to be wrong. Worse yet for many people is being wrong and then publicly corrected. They fear being judged negatively by others. People with that fear then project it onto others, and have new fear about embarrassing the others with a public correction. With the fear of embarrassing another, plus the additional common fear of embarrassing oneself for breaking convention and speaking up in the first place, it's no wonder that most people keep quiet. Personally, I'd rather be corrected than be wrong. To do otherwise, in my opinion, is to allow a failure of the basic scientific method of rejecting untruth.

[@khoavo5758]

Interviewer: von Neumann... John Conway: yeah he doesn't have anything to do with this, either.

[@petros_adamopoulos]

Legend has it, the interviewer... etc :)

[@BartDooper]

Randomness isn't freewill because freewill hasn't anything to do with the past. Wauw. Then a lot of conclusions from calculations are made based on false assumptions.

[@sobeeaton5693]

I think the point is that there is a probability distribution of answers to the question of what is the squared magnitude of the spin of the particle when measured in three directions simultaneously. Yes the result is always two ones and a zero, but the particular distribution of those values is not determined at any one time.

[@BartDooper]

@@sobeeaton5693 I remembered that I had to insert a code before I address a random number in Visual Basic. Because otherwise after compiling and executing the VB script the random numbers where for each execution the same. The extra code was: randomize timer.

[@tonyrowe9423]

RIP

[@averagejohnson3985]

Rip,,, yeah rip

[@RAYSEEME]

it's the unseen ( unknown ) that keeps the moon away and the sun apart ...say invisible spears touching each other separating the planets preventing the implosion , how to alter one spear is the answer....

[@jonnymahony9402]

Logical positivism, people apply it, but never know it that they do it.

[@timmy18135]

I have a spin, the game 🎮 of death, where a colony dies, and we find out how

[@natepolidoro4565]

Not to understand how the world works? wut.

[@huyle845]

CovidImages need to be invested more than half19

[@gregalexander8189]

Peer Review? Medical Profit? Competitive Cuiziner? The Allen Turing Weekly Reader. Bye!

[@onekutguy]

Sounds like complete gibberish.

[@brian_mcnulty]

This guy is just speaking nonsense.

[@biswajit_407]

For stupid someone like you...try to understand in next life

[@votlook]

53:51 the only mathematician with his own clothing line