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dvgrn wrote:How many tiles are there in the Still Life Compatible 3x3 set? And how many if rotations and reflections are allowed?

50 modulo symmetries, or 51 if we count the vacuum tile. (Which happens to be just barely under ½: there are 104 distinct 3×3 tiles altogether.)

Also, I do not recall if I've posted this before, but here is an interesting "widening puffer" in a variant of your 2nd rule: [edit] sorry, doublechecked the rule and pattern: x = 20, y = 20, rule = 02378/345/5 2.2A$.ACD2A$.2A2.2A$.CA2.C2A$3.A2CA$2.A2BA$2.3A$3A$2A10$18.2A$18.2A! Let this run for a w...

There are a lot of these. Interest doesn't seem to have been very high in the last few years, but here are some older discussions you might enjoy checking out (for themselves, or for inspiration on where to explore): Very nearly exploding rules 01356/34/8 24567/345678/5 23567/35/4 [Ray Distributed S...

Here's a reaction that causes a blinker to change its phase. x = 12, y = 4, rule = B3/S23 4bo6bo$4bo6bo$2o2bo6bo$obo! This "horn" mechanism is very closely related to several previously known p3 oscillators. Compare e.g. jam and pulsar quadrant: x = 8, y = 23, rule = B3/S23 5b2o$4bo$7bo$3bo3bo$2bob...

Natural p126: I've seen occasional natural Octagon IIs too; no idea yet what's the precedessor.

Well, this is an interesting " very nearly exploding " rule. (The p9 reminds me of the p7 in the first Generations rule I explored in that topic.) I actually suspect apparent infinite growth patterns might in fact be stabilizing at astronomically large ages, given the following mechanisms: 1) Collis...

This neighborhood seems to have a similar problem as range-1 von Neumann neighborhoods: the minimal birth condition necessary for patterns to escape their bounding box (or, in this case, bounding dodecahedron) is also sufficient for lightspeed expansion. I.e. if two adjacent corners of a cube will s...

No idea about a script, but for things like rakes and puffers, calculating a period by hand is of course quite simple: note when one instance of a final periodic output has been finished assembled, set that as generation 0, and run the pattern until the next one finishes. The main gun explosion reac...

The patterns you called "chaos puffer" aren't puffers. They are just random explosive patterns. Oopz, my mistake They're explosive yes, but still not exactly random — there is after all a periodic engine that stretches the mess on. "Zagger" for example gives birth to a second identifiable westbound...

A funny idea for working with "spark-halo" rules. (Though I think there are much easier ways to create chaotic rules that create Life patterns as a side effect, e.g. starting with B123478/S01234678.)

I'm also pretty sure this could be condensed for a 2x2 unit cell as well.

A word of advice. Generations rules without B2 generally aren't interesting This is a bit overstated (sort of in the same way as "Life-like rules with B2 generally aren't interesting"); there are plenty of interesting A2 Generations rules, though you usually need to set up some more aggressive birt...

This type of behavior is shared by quite a few rules in the same region. One interesting variant is B28, which creates "tunnels" instead of "crystals", for a quilt-like final result. There are also "block-filling rules", i.e. variants on B1/S34. These tend to quickly stabilize to crystals built from...

It's clear that LifeWiki and LifeForum are two important prongs of the current CGOL community, but I suspect they could be closer to each other yet. An initial suggestion: would it be possible to create here a [wiki][/wiki] tag that would automatically generate links to LifeWiki in forum posts? I.e....

OP's question, reframed: – A Life-like CA is defined by the presence of some birth/survival conditions and the absense of others. – Any pattern (spaceship, oscillator, etc.) in a Life-like CA will require some of these conditions to function, but not necessarily all. For example, a blinker will only...

I'm attempting to make sense of the precise motivation behind X-Rule and its "precedessor" (alphabetic ordering of transition environments is terrible for this!), but it's apparent that this is, in terms of its grown type, a more heavily "de-totalized" version of the SansDomino rule class . The smal...

You guys should sticky a thread for people just getting caught up with where the field is today. Which field? [liѕt] Let's subgroup that a bit further: ENGINEERING Glider synthesis Glider color and phase, relating to reflections Construction with slow salvos (p2, monochromatic, mod N, etc.) One-tim...

The two SW-most octants (including the diagonal (x+y = 1) are trivial; everything sufficiently far away NE, starting with (1, 1) being 4, follows from the c/4 diagonal speed limit theorem. That doesn't seem to leave a whole lot of edge cases really.

This is not quite the same as naming individual patterns, but, two terms for families of still lifes that I have kind-of proposed on LifeWiki sometime ago: 1) the family {tub, barge, long barge…; boat, long boat, long long boat…; ship, long ship, long long ship…} I call vessels ; 2) the family {snak...

That is a real problem with the state of modern-day Life. It might be useful to have a "User's manual to Life" that contains all the information one needs to start contributing at a high level. The Life wiki's a great start, perhaps that could be leveraged? Good idea. The problem is getting anyone ...

As far as I've looked into this matter before (or some concepts resembling it), soup propagation speed in Life is almost always lightspeed for connected clusters of cells, and dominated by cluster growth rate outside of them. This makes things very sensitive to the "cloud count" and geometry of the ...

To use a hyperbolic plane, one would need to set up a new system of nearest neighbors, and the rule would no longer be the well-researched Life we know.. Perhaps 4-coordinated pentagonal, or 3-coordinated heptagonal or octagonal rules on hyperbolic geometry would do incredible things.. I've done so...

A small 2c/205 spaceship in a Generations rule.

Rules that are approximately B34/S23, possibly with some additional higher-end birth/survival conditions (B7, B8, S7, S8), have the interesting trait that they allow still lifes — but only a seemingly finite variety. (Life-like rules of this family are explosive in character, but in Generations they...

I was also searching for very nearly exploding rules with S1 (but without S2). I tried some rules with S13 and eventually found B3578/S0138 to be the best rule of this type. The Sidewinder works here, as well as more exotic ships. This is a pretty good case, yes. The rule seems to have a very clear...

A weird thing I noticed in B124/S34 recently. (Much of these effects will work in plain B12/S3 too.) This is one of the 2×2 rules, where any pattern separated in 2×2 on/off segments will continue to evolve as such. And adding a small perturbation in a 2×2 area will quickly devolve into regular chaos...