Main Page

This week's featured article

In May 1998, Stephen Silver produced a one cell thick pattern that exhibits infinite growth, following a conjecture of Nick Gotts that such patterns exist. This pattern was extremely large (12470×1 in the first version, reduced to 5447×1 the following day). In October 1998, Paul Callahan performed an exhaustive computer search to find the following pattern that exhibits infinite growth. It is probably the most well-known one cell thick pattern, and Callahan showed that it is the smallest such one cell thick pattern (in terms of its bounding box) to exhibit infinite growth. It contains 28 alive cells and has a 39×1 bounding box.

Latest news

 600 pattern milestone — June 19th, 2009

LifeWiki is now home to a grand total of 600 patterns and over 750 articles. Exciting new additions to the wiki include weekly featured articles on the front page (as well as trivia snippets), rules boxes on pattern pages that describe what rules that particular pattern functions under, a much more complete list of the smallest known oscillators of each period, our first few articles about reflectors and recent reflector developments (see the rectifier), and several more pages detailing the accomplishments of specific Life enthusiasts. As always, thanks to all of our contributors!

 500 pattern milestone — April 26th, 2009

Over 500 patterns are now catalogued in LifeWiki, and there are over 600 articles total. Some of the most notable recent additions to the database include the addition of glider syntheses in the infoboxes of patterns, greatly expanded information about first-discovered and smallest known spaceships and oscillators of specific speeds and periods, expanded articles about other Life-like cellular automata (such as 2x2, HighLife, and Move), and the first few pages to describe the accomplishments of specific Life enthusiasts (see Noam Elkies for an example). Thanks to all of our contributors!

• 670 patterns (including 301 oscillators, 66 spaceships and 132 still lifes);
• 1737 images (434 animated and 1303 static);
• Over 3000 downloadable pattern files;
• Glider syntheses for 288 patterns.
   

• ...that the fastest 90° stable reflector is over four times slower than its 180° counterpart?
• ...that there are twelve known spaceship velocities, even though an infinite number are proven to be possible?
• ...that there are 71 distinct ways for two gliders to collide, but it is unknown how many distinct 3-glider collisions there are?
• ...that the largest interesting pattern constructed, the caterpillar, contains over 11 million cells?
• ...that the Gosper glider gun was the first pattern to be discovered that exhibits infinite growth?
• ...that the block-laying switch engine and the glider-producing switch engine are the only two infinitely-growing patterns that are known to have ever occurred naturally from a random starting configuration?
• ...that oscillators are known that oscillate at all periods other than 19, 23, 31, 38, 41, 43 and 53?
• ...that the pentadecathlon and the blinker are the only known oscillators that are polyominos in more than one phase?