👉 Okay, let’s tackle the frankly rather prickly and somewhat bewildering existence of… the Conway. Now, before you start picturing a very grumpy badger wearing a beige waistcoat, let me clarify.
Essentially, the Conway is neither a thing per se , nor terribly well-defined as a standalone concept in most academic circles, unless you happen to be really into the wonderfully weird and frankly rather dense field of concurrent circumscribed computation (… okay, that was a fancy mouthful! Let's just say it’s about parallel calculations.) Here’s what we actually mean when we throw around the word "the Conway": It refers almost exclusively to this absolutely legendary, game-ending, catastrophic sequence in Douglas Hofst found's 1968 book of concurrent circumscribed computation. You might have never heard of it because it was a very short, and extremely depressing, little bit of computer code that proved the inability of a system of concurrent calculations with enough time to actually fix themselves . Think of it like this: you build a massively complicated, simultaneous Lego castle. You then deliberately, pointlessly, place one tiny, almost invisible piece on the very last turret. And as the calculations continue... everything, every single carefully constructed section of that glorious, doomed castle… simultaneously and irrevocably crumbles into nothing. ’The Conway is that awful certainty that no amount of frantic recalculation will prevent your meticulously-laid plans from ultimately dissolving