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Today's featured article The R-pentomino is a methuselah that was found by John Conway in 1970. It is by far the most active polyomino with fewer than six cells; all of the others stabilize in at most 10 generations, but the R-pentomino does not do so until generation 1103, by which time it has a population of 116. It releases a glider in generation 69, which was noticed by Richard K. Guy and was the first glider ever observed. The stable pattern that results from the R-pentomino consists of eight blocks, six gliders, four beehives, four blinkers, one boat, one loaf, and one ship. Read more... In the news October 9 Kazyan reduces the glider construction recipe for the B29 spaceship to 16 gliders, with an improvement to 15G by DroneBetter. October 7-8 vilc assembles an adjustable-period oblique spaceship based on (2,1)c/6 puffers and rakes, alternately building and then burning a (4, 2)c/6 bi-block fuse; the next day the spaceship is upgraded to an adjustable-period 48+24N forerake. October 4: Alex Greason finds a large number of reduced-cost glider syntheses by running an exhaustive search in "QuSrc" (a custom-modified version of QuFince) to inspect all possible 5-glider collisions with glider placements in a 15x15 bounding box. September 26: EvinZL notices that a catalyst used in one of Simon Ekstrom's H-to-Gs from July 29 solves a very long-standing limitation of the stable F171 conduit, reducing its repeat time from 227 ticks to as low as 120. September 14: Mitchell Riley finds Lx65 duplicator, a record-breaking elementary Herschel fanout device -- a stable Spartan variant of the known Lx65 conduit, which until now has generally needed sparker support. Editable news item submissions page • Archive •

Did you know... ... that with reverse caber-tosser universal constructor technology, it is possible to build any possible glider-constructible pattern, no matter what size, using only 15 gliders? ... that there are at least four known ways to send information diagonally at a speed greater than the maximum spaceship speed through vacuum? (Complete mechanisms include speeds approaching c/2 via two perpendicular telegraphs, and 2c/3 via a 2c/3 wire.) ... that an oscillator with strict volatility 1 can be constructed for any period 945 or higher? ... that the original Gemini's "below-the-elbow" construction efficiency, roughly three gliders per still life, is about four times better than that of any subsequent self-constructing spaceship? ... that an O(sqrt(log(t))) pattern was constructed in 2010, with a diameter that grows at the slowest possible asymptotic ("big O") rate for any Life pattern? ... that since the first Cordership was assembled from 13 switch engines in 1991, the number of switch engines required has gradually decreased, with a 2-engine Cordership finally making its appearance in 2017? ... that the bounding box and recovery time of the current fastest stable reflector, Mike Playle's Snark, are both more than two full orders of magnitude smaller than the first stable reflector, constructed by Paul Callahan in 1996? ... that as of 2022, no finite elementary replicators have been found in Life? ... that while multiple c/12 diagonal spaceships are known, all of them actually travel at some multiple of 8c/96 diagonal - no pure c/12 diagonal technology is known? ... that the first p23 oscillator, David Hilbert, was created as a modification of a "troll" pattern posted a week earlier?           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: 1714 patterns (including 700 oscillators, 203 spaceships and 374 still lifes); 3733 images (608 animated and 3125 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 986 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