twinb7 wrote:These were once of interest in the early days of GoL, but now they aren't. However, they're still novel.
Have you seen the
Blockic Splitter thread? Those are about the only pure glider generators that have seen much interest lately, just because it's too easy to find this kind of pattern unless you add some kind of extra constraint (like "glider-constructible" or "made out of just blocks".)
There are millions of pure glider generators within reach of a simple Golly search script -- just enumerate all possible patterns inside a 6x6 region, let's say, or a 10x10 eight-way symmetric region if you prefer. Run each one a few thousand ticks, note the bounding box, run another few thousand ticks, then see if the previous bounding box is empty. If so, check to see if the population is stable, nonzero and divisible by five.
It's hard to see why any one of these is much more worthy of attention than any other one, and having millions of them seriously dilutes the interest level. I suppose you could run a contest for the most efficient pure glider generator inside a particular bounding box. The Blockic Splitter thread spent some time on an equivalent challenge, until it became clear that
any cells-per-glider ratio you want can be achieved at the cost of a higher delay time and/or bigger bounding box.
