Redazione RHC : 3 July 2025 08:17
The hacker culture is a fascinating subject.
It is a rich mine of outlandish innovation, genius and intuition.
Of bizarre characters, of fatalistic humor, of memes, but above all culture, engineering and science.
But while Linux has its penguin, BSD has its daemon and Perl His camel, what has always been historically missing in the hacker community was a symbol that represents its history and culture. Today we’re going to talk about the hacker symbol: the glider.
Free software guru Richard Stallman said that hackers had in common a love of excellence and programming.
They wanted their programs to be better than others and they wanted them to do cool things, and they wanted to do something in a much more exciting way by saying, “Look how awesome this is. I bet you didn’t think it could be done!”
In 1970, mathematician John Conway created a set of rules, which allowed the creation of a cellular automaton capable of replication, inspired by John von Neumann, another mathematician who theorizes the concept of a computer virus.
The result was Game of Life, a cellular automaton program constrained by simple rules that described its operation, inside a GO board.
There are no players, there are no winners and losers.
Conway’s simulation is intended to show how, from a few simple initial rules, life evolves, or a behavior very similar to it. These are the rules:
As shown in the illustration below:
Fortunately for those of us with easy access to computers, we can download and run the Golly software, an open source reproduction of the game of life, but the first software version of this simulation takes us back to MIT hackers, the Tech Model Railroad Club, and PDP machines.
The Glider is important because even though it is a simple model, it can move autonomously inside the GO board and can also create complex and difficult-to-predict interactions. The possibilities are truly endless and have inspired generations of hackers to create truly amazing results.
Of course, the historical context of Game of Life makes it even more relevant, considering that it was discussed in a famous article in Scientific American in 1970, just when the Internet and Unix were born.
In fact, it immediately became famous for its ability to create visualizations rich in algorithmic expressions , becoming one of the most fascinating toys for computer enthusiasts and academics in the early 1970s.
The Glider as a symbol, was proposed and then adopted in 2003 by Eric Steven Raymond as a “symbol” of the Hacker culture irspective of the programming language and operating system used, even if not universally recognized.
Conway dedicated his entire life to mathematics, leaving us recently at the age of 83 due to covid-19, providing contributions decisive for several theories that are now the basis of much modern research.
He did not become as famous as John Nash probably because of his closed and shy personality, although his studies were no less.
So remember, when you wear a t-shirt with this symbol or put it on your web page, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating yourself with the hacker culture.
It’s not exactly the same as saying that you are a hacker, this is a title of honor that only others can confer on you, but by using this symbol you are expressing sympathy for the goals, values, way of life and culture of hackers.
This last one is important to know well.
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