Characters
Two items from a Wikipedia watchlist today:
1. User Loyola added a list of central characters to the article on The Glass Bead Game.
2. A dialogue between the Wikipedia characters Prof02 and Charles Matthews continues.
Item 2 seems almost to echo item 1.
The Bead Game, a classic novel by Hermann Hesse, is, in part, a commentary on German cultural history, and the Prof02-Matthews dialogue concerns the Wikipedia article on Erich Heller, a noted scholar of German cultural history.
Matthews is an expert on the game of Go. The Bead Game article says that
“The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go….
Although invented after Hesse’s death, Conway’s Game of Life can be seen as an example of a Go-like glass bead game with surprisingly deep properties; since it can encode Turing machines, it contains in some sense everything.”
For some related thoughts on cellular automata (i.e., Conway’s game) and Go, see The Field of Reason with its links Deep Game, And So To Bed.
For some related thoughts on Turing, see the November 2006 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (special issue on Turing).
For some related religious reflections, see Wolfram’s Theory of Everything and the Gameplayers of Zan, as well as the Log24 entries of last Halloween.