This week's featured article
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An eater is any still life that has the ability to interact with certain patterns without suffering any permanent damage. The term may also sometimes specifically refer to eater 1, a very common and well-known eater. The block was the first known eater, being found to be capable of eating beehives from a queen bee, allowing the construction of the queen bee shuttle. The animation to the right shows an eater 5 feasting on an incoming stream of gliders.
Eaters are extremely important, as they help stabilize and control debris created by complex reactions, allowing for the manipulation of the useful parts of those reactions. Stable reflectors in particular heavily rely on a variety of eaters to work.
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In the news
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- March 18: Nathaniel Johnston posts a YouTube video about the discovery of the true period-15 glider gun and period-16 glider gun, and the history leading up to those discoveries.
- March 17: James Pascua discovers the first period-16 90-degree independent reflector based on a suggestion by Matthias Merzenich, using the period-16 glider gun to hassle a honey farm predecessor and produce a banana spark. 90-degree reflectors are known for all periods except 14, 17, and 19 with periods 15, 23, and 26 having only dependent reflectors.
- March 16-17: Keith Amling completes a new c/4 diagonal unstable puffer engine (only the third known puffer engine at this speed) based on a partial result by Matthias Merzenich. Caleb R. Hilton uses sparkers to stabilise the unstable engine into explicit puffers. David Bell uses this engine to construct the first p52 c/4 diagonal rake, and "b3s23love" and Merzenich use it to substantially reduce the size of the p108 c/4 diagonal rake.
- March 12: 400spartans discovers a population-236 solution to the unique father problem with a self-forcing patch containing 389 set (both on and off) cells and fitting in a 22 × 20 bounding box, each of these statistics being the smallest known.
- March 12: David Bell completes the first c/4 diagonal backward-to-sideways glider reflector using reactions by Keith Amling and Matthias Merzenich. Using one of Bell's glider-releasing reactions and a beehive-to-ship converter by Amling, Merzenich constructs the first c/4 diagonal p28 rake and demonstrates the existence of rakes at periods 32, 36, and 40.
- March 8: James Pascua shows that a previously known "double beehive push catalyst" found by Tanner Jacobi in December 2020 can serve as a 2c/3 wire input conduit for either a single wire or two perpendicular wires, with a repeat time of only 100 ticks; Entity Valkyrie finds a way to activate the catalyst with a single passing Herschel with repeat time 176, and EvinZL points out a reset mechanism with a repeat time as low as 56 ticks.
- March 1: Period1GliderGun discovers the first true period-15 glider gun using a B-heptomino hassler by Carson Cheng hours after finding the first p16 gun. Period-15 is now the smallest period for which a true-period gun is known.
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Did you know...
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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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