Physics 21 Reading List for the week of 2/14/2005

This week's readings.

1. On the Game of Life.

- Read Paul Callahan's article on math.com (unfortunately, the Java applets do not appear to run correctly on recent browsers).

- Read Martin Gardner's 1970 Scientific American Article about the Game of Life (Scientific American 223, 120, 1970). John H. Conway's biography is also very interesting.

- Browse Paul Callahan's fascinating Illustrated Life Pattern Catalog.

2. On overloading operators in C++, useful for an object-oriented implementation of the Game of Life. (Warning: This is somewhat advanced material, but there are usually very good C++ programmers among ph21 students.)

- A C++ annotation by Frank Brokken.

- A more general (but still very interesting) look to OOP practice in C++ is Bjarne Stroustrup's Speaking C++ as a Native (see also the video, slides).

3. On nonblocking communication in MPI (MPI_ISend et similia).

- A formal discussion, in the MPI standard.

- See also Sec. 13.5 in Pacheco's Parallel Programming with MPI (in the lab library).