Snarkmaker
The Snarkmaker is a single-channel stream of gliders that, when aimed to collide with an elbow block in a specific location, will perform a slow glider construction of a Snark, directly on the same lane as the incoming gliders. This allows a construction arm to add one or more lossless elbows, so that it can bend around multiple corners without an exponential increase in construction cost.
The Snarkmaker recipe used in the single-channel and Hashlife-friendly Demonoids, Orthogonoids, spiral growth patterns, and Hydra contains 2,253 gliders, not including preparatory and cleanup operations. The glider count could be considerably reduced with a customized search program.
The single-channel recipe pattern is too big for LifeViewer to display. It contains 2337 gliders, including
- an initial 25-glider elbow-to-hand recipe
- a 19-glider elbow duplicator recipe
- a two-stage recipe that uses 32 gliders to pull the nearer elbow block to a safe distance, so that it can be used to fire zero-degree gliders at the further elbow block
- the actual Snarkmaker recipe
- eight trailing gliders to remove the 0-degree elbow when it's no longer needed, leaving a new elbow on the far side of the completed Snark
The Snark construction is completed in a little under 250,000 generations. The mirror-image Snarkbreaker recipe, removing an existing lossless elbow from a construction arm, is a much cheaper and faster operation.
External links
- Snarkmaker at the Life Lexicon