Biggest event of 2017

[Tom Mazanec]

What is lifology's biggest development of the year (feel free to update if there is a new one in the next 13 days)?

[dvgrn]

What is lifology's biggest development of the year (feel free to update if there is a new one in the next 13 days)?

Hm, well, I guess we won't know for sure until we've run the Pattern of the Year 2017 contest!

If we're talking literally the biggest development, that might have to be the Quest-for-Tetris project... unless you count things like Catagolue passing two hundred trillion objects in its soup census, but that milestone went by without a lot of fanfare.

Here are some items that seemed noteworthy when they went past:

January 2017: Stephen Eker found a record-setting small Garden of Eden with a population of 50 and only 88 ON cells.

February 2017: wildmyron's fixed-length tail for a lightspeed bubble of arbitrary width in the 'stripes' agar.

March 2017: AbhpzTa's three-glider synthesis of a switch engine.

June 2017: new and much smaller spiral-growth pattern based on single-channel technology, demonstrating the construction of lossless signal elbows (Snark reflectors). -- I may be a little biased about this one, and the impenetrable jargon probably gives it away. Also in June, new Demonoid and Orthogonoid spaceships.

September 2017: In an extraordinarily impressive though extraordinarily inefficient way, the QfT (Quest for Tetris) team completed a four-year-old Code Golf challenge on Stack Exchange.
Also, a small "tremi-Snark" period tripler allowed the gun collection to be packed into a smaller space... yet again.

October 2017: discovery of Tanner's p46 oscillator, and also Kazyan's quadri-Snark.

November 2017: color-preserving and color-changing "semi-cenarks".

[Majestas32]

I think the real big CA developments of 2017 focused around compatibility with other CA -- particularly software supporting Hensel notation non-totalistic CA.

[dvgrn]

I think the real big CA developments of 2017 focused around compatibility with other CA -- particularly software supporting Hensel notation non-totalistic CA.

Yeah, it's not clear if "lifology" means just Life, or the (much) larger CA arena. If other CA are allowed, we've got all kinds of other fun stuff (which someone else can make a list of) -- new-record reflectorless rotating oscillators, and spaceships made out of spaceships made out of spaceships, and so on.

Also, highly improbable methuseblobs and an incredible variety of strange bugships and other new discoveries, courtesy of the Golly Gang's addition of Larger than Life rule support to Golly this year. And Catagolue started supporting a lot more rule options as well... and more people started writing search scripts to help make more interesting discoveries, which definitely helped.

[dani]

AbhpzTa's 'lightweight basilisks' were pretty big, probably not the biggest, but still up there. They're pretty dang impressive.

If we're counting OCA, of course

[Naszvadi]

If only CGoL counts, a "we is professeurs, we kan haz publisch articklez"-quality "publication" can be "corrected":
http://repositorio.uam.es/bitstream/han ... 3_ampl.pdf

Excerpt from 4.3 paragraph:
"We have tested the structures that perform the three logical gates in Life, and have found out that all of them are compatible and stable with four different cellular automata rules:"...

Instead applying logical gates, it is easier to verify (not constructional but) computational universality with my improved W110 Unit cell: ../forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3154 - if constructing does not count. Remarkably, Jason Summers published similar Unit cell in 2005.

Remarks on the "article": timing and the existence of constructing mechanism in all 4 mentioned Life-like CA is still missing from it. And it is still bleeding from several aspects.

[gameoflifemaniac]

So, is the Tetris pattern complete or not?

[dvgrn]

So, is the Tetris pattern complete or not?

Sure, it's complete -- as long as you don't mind using special tools to read and alter the state of display pixels. It will be kind of hard to play a game of Tetris in real time with only standard Life simulation software, no matter how fast computers might become.

In Golly, for example, you'd need at least some custom scripts mapped to keyboard shortcuts, to alter various metacell states at the correct times to send rotate/left/right/drop messages.

It would be relatively easy to add a custom display area, to make the states of the relevant RAM locations more visible. The control side of things is more of a problem, because it's irreducibly strange no matter how you do it. Changes to a Life pattern after T=0 just plain go against the whole idea of Conway's Life as a zero-player game.