Just got back from the Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta, where I had the pleasure of presenting with legendary mathematicians John Horton Conway and Richard Guy (who at 99 1/2 years of age is still as spry as a 25-year old!), together with Martin Gardner's son James Gardner and University of Oklahoma student Nathan Justus on John Conway's famous Game of Life.

John simplified Von Neumann's algorithm based on the idea of self-replicating robots. He did this by modifying the game of Go over 18 months, playing with five or six people until the rules just felt right. An important part of the game was having "persnickety" participants like Richard to make sure that every piece was put in its proper place. John felt that every key aspect of the Life algorithm was discovered during this period. 

Once the Life algorithm was programmed by Richard Guy and his son Michael Guy (John's close friend at Cambridge), most nerds started playing with Life as a computer program. John felt that the computer program turned Life into "a spectator sport", and Richard Guy thought "it went too fast".

So this session was to encourage people to try Life the way John thinks of it... as a manual game.  If you are interested in learning to play the Game of Life manually, just write to me for the directions or look around online. This 1970 article about the Game of Life was one of the most popular in Martin Gardner's years of columns for Scientific American.

For more information about John Conway, "the world's most charismatic mathematician", read this fantastic article by his biographer, Siobhan Roberts.

A video of the McGurk Effect, which I created with my friend Josh Aviner a while ago, suddenly appeared in the Independent today. The film demonstrates how seeing influences hearing. Ventriloquists have played with many variations of the McGurk Effect for a very long time.

An extraordinary exhibition of playing cards from the late Middle Ages opened at the Cloisters last night. It was an honor to be invited by curator Timothy B. Husband to perform card magic at the opening reception. I used a facsimile of a deck known as the Cloisters Playing Cards from the Burgundian Netherlands (ca. 1475–80), which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the only complete deck from the period, consisting of 52 hand-painted cards with four suits pertaining to the hunt: Collars (for dogs), Tethers (for hounds), Horns (for hunting), and Nooses (for suspending birds or small game from the belt). 

You can read a nice New York Times review of the exhibition here.

Just an average night working at a wild party in downtown Manhattan. Thanks to the lovely make-up artists for my raccoon eyes!

Had a fun time tonight performing in Spanish at the MoMath gala for honoree Santiago Calatrava, the famous Spanish architect of the new WTC transportation hub and projects around the world. It was a splendid night, and over $1 million was raised in about 15 minutes!

Discussion about literature, magic and consciousness with bestselling German author Daniel Kehlmann, presented by Deutsches Haus at NYU and the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Thank you, Juliane Camfield and Eric Banks, for organizing this extraordinary night!

Dr. Douglas Gaffin, Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, invited me for a special visit to his Honors Colloquium course titled "Beyond Darwin: Selection in Thought, Religion, and Politics." We had a productive couple of days, and I even managed to fit in a stage show for the students at night. Here we are in front of the iconic statue of the Seed Sower (who sows the seeds of knowledge, to bear fruit in the future) forming the letters "OU" with our arms. 

My high school in Superior (Wisconsin) was kind enough to honor me with a Lifetime Achievement Award. I'm not sure who was more proud, my mom or my wife. Thank you to my friends who came out to celebrate with us, and congratulations to the other honorees!

What a thrill! I managed to orchestrate this meeting of math and chess legends in New York today. From left to right: John Horton Conway, Richard Guy, Garry Kasparov, Elwyn Berlekamp. 

Presentation with anthropologist Eduardo Kohn (McGill University) at the 4th Stavros Niarchos Foundation International Conference on Philanthropy, held in Athens (Greece). 

Eduardo Kohn, Stelios Vasilakis of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and yours truly.

Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was one of the speakers at the conference.