biology

Sunday Timewaster: the irRegular Game of Life

4:30AM Maggie Greene | The irRegular Game of Life is a weird but fun little game (by irRegular Games) based on mathematician John Horton Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ theory. In this iteration, you are given puzzles to solve and must set the little cells into motion to meet the goals of each level. It’s surprisingly hypnotic at times — after getting past the initial introductory levels, you watch the cells shuffle back and forth, creating a variety of patterns and interacting with each other. There’s also a sandbox mode and some other features; the regular puzzle mode was plenty fun for me. More »

The Astrobiologist and the Game Designer

4:00AM Maggie Greene | Reader Denis F. sent us a heads up about an interesting chat between Will Wright and Jill Tarter, noted astrobiologist and director of SETI whose research helped inspire Spore. As you can probably guess, the discussion is pretty abstract at times and goes from gaming to the value of science to where we’ll be in 10,000 years. It’s pretty interesting, and there’s a transcript of the interview: More »