ConwayLife.com

Currently, we are working on a paper for AAAI that will elaborate our approach and we are running some more experiments to see if we can find an even smaller GoE. Once we have news we will post more info here.

Achim Flammenkamp verified that this pattern has no predecessor. Also, the pattern got a sound name: orphan 7 .
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/achim/orphan_7th.html

Why one ring of empty cells? These are not part of the orphan pattern and would therefore be a Garden of Eden containing the orphan pattern. If the orphan pattern already has no precursor an extra ring won't alter that. In my opinion one ring of don't cares is enough.

And why three rings of X-cells?

Yes, of course we used another ring of cells around the 10 x 10 box in order to find the orphan. Currently WLS is running with one ring of don't care (x) cells.

Actually, here you can find our orphan. http://homepage.tudelft.nl/37b0y/

It's not very clear to me which search settings I have to use to find a previous generation (if it exists). I tried to fill in the possible orphan pattern, keep default search settings (find parent only = off) and start a search. I got loads of warnings about inconsistent cells at row x column y. So...

Does anybody know software to verify Garden's of Eden / orphan patterns?

Since with a new approach (in contrast to backtracking) I might have found some new 10x10 orphan patterns.

Please let me know.