The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
A cellular automaton is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessellation structures, and iterative arrays. Cellular automata have found application in various areas, including physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling.
Shannara is a series of high fantasy novels written by Terry Brooks, beginning with The Sword of Shannara in 1977 and concluding with The Last Druid which was released in October 2020; there is also a prequel, First King of Shannara. The series blends magic and primitive technology and is set in the Four Lands, which are identified as Earth long after civilization was destroyed in a chemical and nuclear holocaust called the Great Wars. By the time of the prequel First King of Shannara, the world had reverted to a pre-industrial state and magic had re-emerged to supplement science.
A New Kind of Science is a book by Stephen Wolfram, published by his company Wolfram Research under the imprint Wolfram Media in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata. Wolfram calls these systems simple programs and argues that the scientific philosophy and methods appropriate for the study of simple programs are relevant to other fields of science.
An automaton is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions. Some automata, such as bellstrikers in mechanical clocks, are designed to give the illusion to the casual observer that they are operating under their own power or will, like a mechanical robot. The term has long been commonly associated with automated puppets that resemble moving humans or animals, built to impress and/or to entertain people.
In publishing, a note is a brief text in which the author comments on the subject and themes of the book and names supporting citations. In the editorial production of books and documents, typographically, a note is usually several lines of text at the bottom of the page, at the end of a chapter, at the end of a volume, or a house-style typographic usage throughout the text. Notes are usually identified with superscript numbers or a symbol.
The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson and unveiled on 30 May 1764 in France. The mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this—the food was collected in one inner container, and the pre-stored feces were "produced" from a second, so that no actual digestion took place—Vaucanson hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be designed.
Brian Selznick is an American illustrator and author best known as the writer of The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), Wonderstruck (2011), The Marvels (2015) and Kaleidoscope (2021). He won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration recognizing The Invention of Hugo Cabret. He is also known for illustrating children's books such as the covers of Scholastic's 20th-anniversary editions of the Harry Potter series.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children's historical fiction book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick and published by Scholastic. The hardcover edition was released on January 30, 2007, and the paperback edition was released on June 2, 2008. With 284 pictures between the book's 533 pages, the book depends as much on its pictures as it does on the words. Selznick himself has described the book as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things".
Vulcan is the god of fire including the fire of volcanoes, deserts, metalworking and the forge in ancient Roman religion and myth. He is often depicted with a blacksmith's hammer. The Vulcanalia was the annual festival held August 23 in his honor. His Greek counterpart is Hephaestus, the god of fire and smithery. In Etruscan religion, he is identified with Sethlans.
Jamie Thomson is a British writer, editor and game developer, and winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012.
The history of robots has its origins in the ancient world. During the Industrial Revolution, humans developed the structural engineering capability to control electricity so that machines could be powered with small motors. In the early 20th century, the notion of a humanoid machine was developed.
In the mathematical study of cellular automata, Rule 90 is an elementary cellular automaton based on the exclusive or function. It consists of a one-dimensional array of cells, each of which can hold either a 0 or a 1 value. In each time step all values are simultaneously replaced by the XOR of their two neighboring values. Martin, Odlyzko & Wolfram (1984) call it "the simplest non-trivial cellular automaton", and it is described extensively in Stephen Wolfram's 2002 book A New Kind of Science.
Minsoo Kang is a historian and writer. Currently, he is an associate professor of European intellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Kang is also an expert on the history of automata in science and in fiction.
Hephaestus makes many appearances in popular culture.
A reversible cellular automaton is a cellular automaton in which every configuration has a unique predecessor. That is, it is a regular grid of cells, each containing a state drawn from a finite set of states, with a rule for updating all cells simultaneously based on the states of their neighbors, such that the previous state of any cell before an update can be determined uniquely from the updated states of all the cells. The time-reversed dynamics of a reversible cellular automaton can always be described by another cellular automaton rule, possibly on a much larger neighborhood.
The Frankenstein Chronicles is a British television period crime drama series that first aired on ITV Encore on 11 November 2015, designed as a re-imagining of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Lead actor Sean Bean also acted as an associate producer on the first series. It follows Inspector John Marlott (Bean), a river police officer who uncovers a corpse made up of body parts from eight missing children and sets about to determine who is responsible.
ODY-C was a comic book series created by Eisner award winning writer Matt Fraction and artist Christian Ward. The series is a science fictional and gender-bent re-imagination of Homer's Odyssey. The first issue was published in November 2014 by the American company Image Comics. It depicts the journeys of three warrior queens, Odyssia, Gamen, and Ene, as they return from their century-long siege on the city Troiia-VII. ODY-C has been described as a "masterfully psychedelic, gender-bending, space-operatic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey."
Clockwork Planet is a Japanese light novel series, written by Yuu Kamiya and Tsubaki Himana, and illustrated by Shino. Kodansha has published four volumes since April 2, 2013, under their Kodansha Ranobe Bunko imprint. The story is set in a clockpunk fantasy version of the world, in which the entire planet is run by clockwork. The main characters are five people who, after a month of meeting, become the world's most infamous terrorists.
Magic Under Glass is a young-adult fantasy novel by American writer Jaclyn Dolamore. It was published in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing, with 240 pages. Magic Under Glass and its 2012 sequel Magic Under Stone were adapted as a fantasy rock musical in 2017 by the Columbia Center for Theatrical Arts.
