He didn't say once in the entire article that he thought it was a homage to his work. He simply said it used his favorite rule. Everything he writes is about the beauty of this part of the 'computational universe', about giving the architects credit for choosing a pattern which blocks on average 50% of the light, about how they could potentially have extended the work to use more of the pattern. It's a very interesting article with very little of SW's infamous blow-hardiness in it.

In other words, no "Wow Cambridge honored me and my amazing automata!", lots of "These patterns I've loved for years are on a building and that is really exciting."

>Does he ever mention Conway in any of his texts?

For "A New Kind of Science", here is the index entry:

    Conway, John H. (England/USA, 1937- )
      and arithmetic recurrences, 1115
      and Game of Life, 877, 880, 949
      and iterated run-length encoding, 905
      and non-periodic tilings, 943
      in Preface, xiii
      and recursive sequences, 907
      and universality of Life, 1117

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/index/names/a-e.php?Searc...

I mean it's literally a pattern from Wolfram's cellular automaton, even Conway himself wouldn't think it represents Game of Life.

Not in this one, for sure ...

That is one damn insecure guy.