Familiar fours
The familiar fours are common constellations of four identical objects. The five most common (in decreasing order of frequency) are traffic light (four blinkers), honey farm (four beehives), blockade (four blocks), fleet (four ships in the form of two ship-ties), and bakery (four loaves in the form of two half-bakeries). Four skewed blocks is also occasionally included in the list.
Traffic light (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Honey farm (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Blockade (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Fleet (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Bakery (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Four skewed blocks (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Other less familiar fours include the land of lakes (four ponds in the form of two bi-ponds) and four eaters (four eater 1s) found in Dean Hickerson's Life integer constructions,[1] but these do not have common enough random-ash predecessors to be counted as familiar fours.
Land of lakes (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Four eaters (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
An interesting thing to note is that several of the familiar fours can be formed from one of their constituent objects via the addition of a single cell:
- a traffic light can be formed by adding a single cell to a blinker in one of two ways: either forming a T-tetromino, or placing the extra cell one cell farther away such that it evolves into a Y in the next generation;
- a honey farm can be formed by adding a single cell to a beehive, either inside it, on one of the corners as to form a bun, or one of the far tips as to give a spoon-like shape;
- a fleet can be formed by adding a single cell to a ship which is diagonally adjacent to it.
See also
References
- ↑ Dean Hickerson (March 26, 2007). "Patterns formed from the digits of numbers". Retrieved on March 15, 2019.
External links
- Familiar fours at the Life Lexicon