This week's featured article
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| New gun 1, or originally simply "new gun", is a period-46 gun discovered by Bill Gosper in 1971. It was the second basic gun to be found, the first being the Gosper glider gun. A number of other ways of constructing a gun from two twin bees shuttles have since been discovered.
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In the news
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- September 15-28: Collaborative progress on enormously long-lived diehards continues on the "engineered diehards" thread, passing the threshold on September 28 of 11^^^3 = 11 ^^ (11 ^^ 11) ticks (where ^^ is the operator for tetration, i.e., iterated exponentiation).
- September 24: Carson Cheng discovers a period-76 shuttle for a pair of pi-heptominoes which, at 52 cells, is the smallest known oscillator of this period.
- September 23: Evin discovers compact, stable glider pulse dividers with new period multipliers of 5, 11, 12, and 4+6n
- September 18: Mitchell Riley discovers 86P107, the first engine-based period-107 oscillator, and the smallest known oscillator of that period.
- September 9: Hartmut Holzwart constructs a new type of c/2 orthogonal agar ship.
- September 6: Keith Amling completes a period-6 c/3 orthogonal ship containing a simple wick.
- September 4: 400spartans constructs a 278-cell unconstructible still life, smaller in population and bounding box than the previous minimum 306-cell version.
- September 1: The 2022 Pattern of the Year competition concludes with a tie for first place between the explicit 15-glider reverse caber-tosser and the unsynthesizable and limited-ancestor objects.
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Pattern collection
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| The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find:
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Did you know...
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- ... 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?
- ... that exactly two years after a fake loafer-producing soup was posted to the forums on April Fools' Day, a real soup was found on April 1, 2020?
- ... patterns have been constructed whose fate is currently unknown (based on the twin primes and Collatz conjectures)?
- ... a pattern of 44 cells exists whose population grows by exactly one cell each generation?
- ... it is possible to send a signal from one side to the other of an infinite diagonal line of cells without destroying the line?
- ... there are 'Heisenburp' reactions which can detect the passage of a glider without affecting it in any way?
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