Bill Gosper
| Bill Gosper | ||
| ||
| Born | 1943 | |
|---|---|---|
| Residence | Unknown | |
| Nationality | American | |
| Institutions | Stanford University | |
| Alma mater | MIT | |
Ralph William Gosper, Jr. (born 1943, commonly known as Bill Gosper), is an American mathematician and programmer who was a member of the MIT group and found some of the first complex and interesting constructed patterns in the Game of Life.
He found the first known (and still most well-known) shuttle oscillators: queen bee shuttle, twin bees shuttle and centinal. Based on the queen bee shuttle, he created by far his most well-known pattern, the Gosper glider gun. The Gosper glider gun was not only the first gun to be discovered, but also the first known finite pattern to exhibit infinite growth of any kind. He also found some of the other earliest known guns, including new gun 1 and new gun 2, and the first first known puffers, puffer 1 and puffer 2.
Gosper also created the extremely important HashLife algorithm for simulating Life-like cellular automata.
External links
- Bill Gosper at Mark D. Niemiec's Life Page (Life Credits)
- Bill Gosper at Wikipedia
- Homepage of Bill Gosper
- Bill Gosper's OEIS wiki userpage (and his recent edits to the OEIS itself)
- his pages on tweedledum.com, and in particular the list of interesting algebraic identities (linked from his OEIS acccount)
Patterns found by Bill Gosper
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