ITS is alive
Donald Fisk wrote a version of Life [1] [2] [3] in MIDAS assembler for ITS.
Life was invented by John Conway. He is the same guy who also discovered surreal numbers. Donald Knuth wrote a very good book about surreal numbers.
One of the first exercises in Etudes for Programmers by Charles Wetherell is to implement Life. This wonderful book teaches programming like no other book before or after. Sadly it has been out of print for 25 years.
I think Edward Fredkin was first to state that the "universe is a computer program". Daniel F. Galouye wrote the best book about this idea which was published under the titles "Simulacron-3" and "Counterfeit World".
Dan Weinreb sent me an update regarding Life in MIDAS:
When I inquired about MLIFE and Gosper, Dan came back with this answer:Regarding your 13 Jan blog entry: good for him, but there was already a Life program written in Midas for ITS when I showed up at MIT in 1976. It was a lot longer than Donald Fisk's one, and was very, very, very fast. It was one of the programs I studied to learn how to program in Midas; unfortunately, I did not realize that it was coded in a very opaque style... I don't know whether any version of this program still exists. It was called "MLIFE". Whoever wrote it had left the lab by the time I showed up. Bill Gosper would probably remember who wrote it (Gosper had also left by then, but I met him later).
The absolute, hands-down best Midas program I ever read was COMSAT, the mail transfer agent, by Ken Harrenstein. He adopted a set of programming conventions and followed them carefully, commented clearly and articulately, and so on. I see that Donald Fisk's program uses Ken's macro package, from the KSC directory. (It stands for Kennedy Space Center.) I helped Ken Harrenstein maintain it, a little bit. I think I am the author of the SUPDUP utility, which is probably entirely useless these days on KLH-10's. I was only doing Midas programming for maybe half a year before Richard Greenblatt started me on the Lisp Machine in the summer of 1977...
-- Dan
OK, the answer is that the original Life program at AI was written by Mike Speciner. The core algorithms were re-written for speed later by Steve Root, and that plus Mike's user interface are, as far as anyone can reconstruct, the MLIFE program that I encountered when I showed up. By then Speciner, Root, and Gosper had all moved on.
-- Dan