Syringe
| Syringe | |||||||||
| View static image | |||||||||
| Pattern type | Conduit | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conduit type | Converter | ||||||||
| Input | Glider | ||||||||
| Output | Herschel | ||||||||
| Number of cells | 66 | ||||||||
| Bounding box | 24 × 34 | ||||||||
| Step | Unknown | ||||||||
| Recovery time (ignoring FNG if any) |
78 ticks | ||||||||
| Minimum overclock period (ignoring FNG if any) |
Unknown | ||||||||
| Spartan? | No | ||||||||
| Discovered by | Tanner Jacobi | ||||||||
| Year of discovery | 2015 | ||||||||
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The syringe[1] is a glider-to-Herschel converter composed of an eater 1, a block, a beehive with tail, and a large welded still life[note 1] that combines an eater 2 and an eater 5. It works by converting a bait block into a pi, then hassling the pi into a B-heptomino that restores the bait block over the course of its evolution. Its repeat time is 78, but it can also "overclock" to function with glider streams of period 74 or 75. Jeremy Tan, who coined the term 'syringe' to describe how it injects a glider into a Herschel system, observed that attempting to overclock the intermediate periods of 76 and 77 causes the block to become an LWSS or MWSS; this immediately crashes into the beehive with tail so is of limited utility.
The syringe allows much more compactness and timing versatility in signal circuitry than Herschel conduits alone, and in combination with the snark, it can largely replace very long Herschel tracks (if they are not required to be spartan) by simply passing a glider from somewhere near the start to somewhere near the destination. This works similarly to Herschel transmitters and receivers, but in more flexible way. Within 3 days of the syringe's discovery, over half of all known guns from periods 14 to 999 were obsoleted by loops involving a syringe and various snarks.
The syringe was voted on ConwayLife.com as Pattern of the Year 2015.[2]
Dependent form
A variant of the syringe that replaces the welded eater 2 and eater 5 with a separate eater 2 and eater 1 was used in the Demonoid, a self-constructing spaceship. The eater 1 can only be made to fit if the syringe is followed by a dependent conduit. In rare cases where the following conduit does not allow any glider to escape at all (like the dependent beehive-producing H-to-MWSS conduit), only the eater 2 is required.
This 'dependent syringe', unlike the variant with the complex weld, is considered Spartan. It is most useful when attached to an R200, as this gives the minimal recovery time of 90.
See also
Notes
External links
- Syringe at the Life Lexicon
References
- ↑ Tanner Jacobi (March 19, 2015). "Re: Let's find a G-to-X". Retrieved on March 22, 2015.
- ↑ Alexey Nigin (February 11, 2016). "Re: Pattern of the Year 2015 (Votes)". Retrieved on February 15, 2016.