[HN Gopher] A. K. Dewdney has died
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A. K. Dewdney has died
Author : schoen
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-03-31 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lfpress.remembering.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (lfpress.remembering.ca)
| DaemonAlchemist wrote:
| His book "The Planiverse" was one of the first books I read as a
| kid that really made me think. I was fascinated by his detailed
| descriptions of a 2D universe and its implications for how that
| would affect biology, society, and everything else.
| whitten wrote:
| I greatly enjoyed this book. Is there a copy of it online ?
| billyjmc wrote:
| libgen has it, but I'm not sure if that's what you meant.
| epivosism wrote:
| Ebay has used copies for ~12$. I got a few to give away to
| nephews & nieces who might be interested in this kind of
| thing
| epivosism wrote:
| +1 I LOVED it. Huge, huge, influential book in my thinking when
| I read it at 11 or 12. It led to interest in world simulations,
| sociology and how it relates to physical structures and limits,
| physics simulations, and so much more.
| jhbadger wrote:
| He also was a worthy successor to Martin Gardner in his
| Scientific American columns, and like Gardner, collected those
| columns into a series of books, _The Tinkertoy Computer_ , _The
| Magic Machine_ , and _The Armchair Universe_. What made his
| columns a bit different from Gardner 's is that writing in the
| 1980s and 1990s, he often presented the puzzles and what not as
| ideas for readers to program on their home computers.
| pvg wrote:
| His _Computer Recreations_ column was a huge influence on me as a
| kid and I imagine lots of other nerds in a similar (and maybe not
| so similar) age cohort.
|
| He helped start the fractal craze - there was hardly an article
| you could read about it that didn't mention his Mandlebrot piece.
| Core War has made the rounds here but there was so much more - my
| first encounter with public key cryptography, all sorts of
| computer generative art, genetic algorithms, simulations
| ecological and celestial and on and on.
|
| The pieces always had a practical bent - something you could
| typically implement on your own (or school's) dinky computer.
| Many were also a side door to entire branches of mathematics -
| diff. eq. class can feel like torture but simulating your way to
| the Volerra-Lotka predator-prey model is fun. Plus it sounds like
| something invented in a Weyland Yutani research lab.
|
| For the flavour, a recent HN post right in the Spirit of Dewdney
| category, the kind of adventure a _Computer Recreations_ column
| might take you on:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39745923
|
| Another one is the popular twitter account of gravitationally
| interacting bodies animations.
|
| A.K. Dewdney made Steve Jobs's 'bicycle for the mind' quip real.
| His works were a blessing, may his memory be one too.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Discovered a tiny but alive Corewars contest online in the early
| 2000s and discovered the wonders of computer communities over
| distances that were insurmountable in real life. Thank you.
| whitten wrote:
| Is the contest continuing in the present ?
| wood_spirit wrote:
| I think it's much quieter but perhaps it is just needing a
| few new HNers to discover the intoxicating subtlety?
| http://www.corewars.org/
| shever73 wrote:
| I discovered Core Wars through his Computer Recreations column
| and enjoyed playing it for years. I still love his line about
| "programs doing battle in the dark and noiseless corridors of
| core".
|
| RIP
| me_again wrote:
| He had a real gift for making theoretical topics interesting. I
| read his book The New Turing Omnibus
| (https://archive.org/details/newturingomnibus0000dewd_q3p6) as a
| teenager, and credit it with a decent part of getting me into
| computer science. Rest easy.
| tekacs wrote:
| Another thankful note from me for The New Turing Omnibus. It's
| recommended to students entering Cambridge University in the
| UK, and I read it as a young teenager. I was already familiar
| with a lot of the concepts contained, but it was a really good
| stitching together of a variety of disciplines. It gives just
| enough of a peek into each of them to spur curiosity about the
| things you might want to study more -- and at least makes you
| aware of the things that you might be less interested in.
| isomorph wrote:
| Loved New Turing Omnibus too. It felt very exciting to program
| some basic genetic algorithms and even the Newton-Raphson
| method as a teenager
| linuxlizard wrote:
| I also read _The New Turing Omnibus_ as a young CS student. I
| really enjoyed reading about all those different areas of
| Computer Science.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| I spent an excessive amount of time playing with an animated
| version of Dewdney's wallpaper algorithm from The Turing
| Omnibus, first with 286 fixed point arithmetic and later with
| 486 FPU code.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| For the ultimate referent of "Maltese Cross Movement", see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive
|
| For the proximal referent:
| http://elumiere.net/especiales/hancox/dewdneybroomer_en.php
| drcode wrote:
| Boy, reading his articles in Sci Am in my formative years
| probably affected how I think in 2024 more than any other person,
| other than maybe Martin Gardner (well, aside from family members)
|
| Such a shame what has happened with Sci Am as a publication since
| then.
|
| When I pick it up now, it feels like I'm reading a tabloid
| magazine.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's a dim shadow of its former self.
| tempodox wrote:
| His monthly column in Scientific American often inspired me. I
| wouldn't be where I am today without him. He will not be
| forgotten.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| He had an outsized impact on me as well. My very first
| programming experiments (learning on the Macintosh) were
| predator-prey simulations (fish vs. sharks -- he called it "Wa-
| Tor" since his ocean grid wrapped around with a toroidal
| topology.)
|
| Re-reading his stuff now is fun: I find I understand it a lot
| better than college-age me did back in the 1980's.
|
| Plenty of his work can be found on archive.org [1]
|
| "Armchair Universe" [2] is a nice collection of a number of his
| "Computer Recreations" columns -- I think "The Tinkertoy
| Computer" [3] as well.
|
| As someone mentioned, his "The Planiverse" [4] was an extension
| to Abbott's "Flatland".
|
| [1] https://archive.org/search?query=A.+K.+dewdney
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/armchairuniverse0000dewd_x2e7
|
| [3] https://archive.org/details/tinkertoycomputer00dewd
|
| [4] https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd_y8t2
| whartung wrote:
| I was a regular reader of his columns in Scientific American. I
| think I have one of the anthology books.
|
| I enjoyed the columns, tickled my geeky interests. Outside of
| what I read in SA, I didn't know anything about him. He was just
| a by line on a magazine column.
|
| That said, I was honestly quite stricken when I heard he was not
| just suggesting 9/11 conspiracy theories, but the ones he was
| touting were so outrageous.
|
| Like I said, I didn't know anything about this person. I don't
| know how in or out of character such things were for them.
|
| But, personally, I was rather devastated and disappointed when I
| heard about it.
|
| RIP, condolences to his family.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Dewdney
| arecurrence wrote:
| "Dewdney was a member of the 9/11 truth movement, and theorized
| that the planes used in the September 11 attacks had been
| emptied of passengers and were flown by remote control.[13] He
| based these claims in part on a series of experiments (one with
| funding from Japan's TV Asahi) that, he claimed, showed that
| cell phones do not work on airplanes, from which he concluded
| that the phone calls received from hijacked passengers during
| the attacks must have been faked."
|
| well... I must admit that was unexpected.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I interpret this sort of thing as a symptom of an undiagnosed
| brain disorder. More a cause for pity than anything else.
| me_again wrote:
| Wow, I didn't see that twist coming either. A sad reminder
| that conspiracy thinking can strike even people who are
| otherwise seemingly very rational.
| epivosism wrote:
| Robin Hanson reviews Planiverse here:
| https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-planiversehtml which might
| give you an idea of what some of his work was like!
|
| > The book seems crazy wrong on how its mystical quest ends, and
| on its assumed connection to a computer simulation in our
| universe. But I presume that the author would admit to those
| errors as the cost of telling his story. However, the book does
| very well on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and low
| level engineering. That is, on noticing how such things change as
| one moves from our 3D world to this 2D world, including via many
| fascinating diagrams. In fact this book does far better than most
| "hard" science fiction. Which isn't so surprising as it is the
| result of a long collaboration between dozens of scientists.
| tangus wrote:
| I used to buy used Scientific Americans just to read his column.
| RIP
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAG7Y8WGDcI
| jng wrote:
| what's the connection?
| jng wrote:
| I'm so grateful to him, his early work was a massive influence
| for me as a kid. I lent one of Dewdney's books to a neighbor
| friend's dad, an architect, and he gave me my first paid gig as a
| programmer. Can't overstate the influence in my career.
|
| Also, I distinctly remember his column showing how to generate
| text based on statistics learned from an existing corpus. It has
| come to mind more than once in this last period of LLM magic --
| the essence was already there.
|
| Thank you and rest in peace.
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