Main Page

Welcome to LifeWiki, the wiki for Conway's Game of Life. Currently contains 2,577 articles.

Guns Methuselahs Oscillators

Puffers Spaceships Still lifes

Wicks All patterns Everything else

This week's featured article The lightweight spaceship (or LWSS for short) is the smallest orthogonally moving spaceship, and the second most common spaceship (after the glider). It moves orthogonally at c/2 and has period 4. It was found by John Conway in 1970. Read more... In the news April 30: Christopher D'Agostino posts a modification of a partial Herschel-to-Herschel converter pointed out by AlbertArmstain, producing an easily connectable and completely Spartan L141 conduit with three output gliders including the FNG and SNG. April 19: Nathaniel Johnston completes a "Herschel Tracks Tutorial" YouTube video about creating custom oscillators using Herschel conduits. April 8: David Bell constructs and refines a puffer demonstrating that all sufficiently high c/4 diagonal rake periods are achievable. Matthias Merzenich uses this to construct a clean p3532+4N rake. Editable news item submissions page • Archive •

Did you know... ... that not all statorless oscillators are phoenixes, but statorless period 2 oscillators must be phoenixes? ... that no pattern inside a 6 × 6 bounding box is a Garden of Eden? ... that Garden of Eden patterns with only 45 live cells have been found? ... that there are orphans that are 5 cells high, but 4-cell-high orphans are impossible? ... that 6-cell-high Garden of Eden patterns were constructed as far back as 1973, but 5-cell-high GoEs were unknown until Steven Eker found some in 2016? ... that while both a big S and a ship-tie require four gliders to synthesise individually, there is a dirty 3-glider collision whose final ash contains one of each? ... that no way is known for a 3 × 3 pattern to be tiled into an M × N rectangle to produce a Garden of Eden, but that there are 4 × 3, 4 × 4 and larger tiles that can be repeated in this way to produce GoEs? ... that there are spaceship stabilizations of agars? ... that block is the only finite strict still life where each living cell has exactly 3 neighbours? ... that all strict still lifes up to and including 14 cells have been found by apgsearch in asymmetrical 16 × 16 soups?           Showing 10 items out of 180 More did you know... Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1671 patterns (including 691 oscillators, 176 spaceships and 381 still lifes); 3758 images (608 animated and 3150 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 958 patterns. Download pattern collection 6MB .zip archive containing the 5200+ Game of Life RLE pattern files used on the wiki Also available: 38KB .zip archive containing approximately 75 pattern files for other cellular automata