ConwayLife.com

You can pull a block in with two gliders like this: ... You can push a block out with three gliders like this: ... Early this year Calcyman put together a binary-counter pattern using these reactions attached to an implementation of a finite-state machine: http://calcyman.awardspace.co.uk/life-mass...

My latest invention: another stable HWSS -> G Converter! x = 619, y = 493, rule = LifeHistory Yow! Now I understand why "Extreme" is part of your name... do you have a specific purpose in mind for this particular glider output location? You can get lots more gliders out of all those F171s, if you n...

The only spaceships in Life which have constructions are the standard spaceships (i.e the glider, LWSS, MWSS & HWSS, but then you knew that), some Corderships and a 2c/5 spaceship discovered by Tim Coe which proved tractable because its central components could be produced by perturbing constructib...

I haven't tested the script yet, but as Python's strip function removes all whitespace from the front and back of the string (including /n, /r/n, and /r, the three common line breaks) it should work fine on all platforms. Well, but the script's first act is to split the input on '\n'. I've occasion...

The problem seems to occur only on Firefox -- neither IE7 nor Google Chrome seem to have any trouble with copied Select-All RLE from the forums. Can someone confirm that the script works OK on Mac and Linux systems? Sometimes problems show up because 'standard' newline characters in text data are di...

How should I get started? Is there anything special I need to know? (Like what weird coordinate system Golly must use since it's an infinite plane?) Read through Help > Python Scripting carefully before you start writing your scripts -- especially the Cell Lists section toward the bottom, explainin...

x = 164, y = 167, rule = B3/S23 [16 gliders] That looks a little more complicated than it needs to be. You can sneak in and reproduce the key still lifes from a later stage of the reaction, which lets you skip building the Herschel entirely. Saves seven gliders and a couple hundred ticks: #C blocke...

Or if you don't mind a catalyzed synthesis, there are lots more possibilities with two or three gliders. A two-glider B-heptomino can be converted to a clean Herschel by a snake-block combination. Or two gliders can produce a boat or beehive or other still life, and one more glider converts that int...

Dave, I really think we should update the stuff in LifeHistoryRules.zip so that it matches Golly's supplied LifeHistory rule. And I promised to do that back in May, too -- my apologies. I don't have much time left before this weekend, but I'll take care of the problem then. As it happens, I had to ...

...I see eight billion .rle's in Hersrch. Could you please paste the basic conduits into this thread for me? What! And give away all the carefully guarded secrets of the Herschel Plumbers' Guild -- just like that? ... Well, okay -- but only because you said "please". The following is a fairly compl...

...how would I make a Herschel-to LWSS converter that works via synthesis, not some fancy conduit? Does it have to be all gliders, or does a ship plus two gliders count as a "synthesis"? How about a Herschel plus one glider? The following would make a somewhat simpler practice problem than a 3-glid...

That's a nice enough diagram but it's not a Geminoid constructor! Yes, I was thinking of writing in with the same objection. If "a glider in one line would have to be reflected while a glider in another line would have to cause the reflector to translate itself", then the "reflector" starts to look...

... probably in soup-census or Glue results. Slightly off-topic, but is any version of the 'glue' software publicly available to download? (I have a feeling I asked before on this forum ages ago when there were only 5 or so members, but I don't think I got a reply.) Well, I put the pieces of my old...

You're making this task unnecessarily complex. Here's a simple 6-glider synthesis of the 29-cell still life... Well, I did say somebody would be able to do better. Very nice! I didn't look very hard for replacements for the 9-cell active object that I went on about, because I'm actually more intere...

Small soup that produces a strange 29-cell still life...: That is indeed a rather unusual object to find floating in one's soup. Fairly quick spontaneous generation, too -- it should allow a cheaper synthesis than a standard incremental process would. I don't know for sure whether a "natural" recip...

If I may interject at this point, ptbsearch is another depth-first tree search. By using a pre- and post-processor, ptbsearch can be engineered into a generic search program for finding stable reflectors. And since Dave Greene has offered $100 of prizes for compact stable reflectors, it may be wort...

I think the principal difficulty with a distributed search would be establishing what searches to perform... there is the potential for a runaway proliferation of searches... Agreed. For any of these search utilities, if the server automatically generates new searches to try, it's eventually likely...

I haven't used gencols myself, so forgive my ignorance -- is it the type of thing that would benefit from a distributed search setup? That is, would it be a reasonable modification to make to have a downloadable executable file for people to run and have it automatically choose some particular sear...

Just for the record, these are based on Nicolay Beluchenko's p51 and octosymmetric p37 oscillators. (At first I thought this might be an announcement of new p37 and p51 base mechanisms.)

Producing a Gemini gun is more difficult, but not totally intractable. A practical method of synthesis would be to generate the 'shell' of a Gemini, and then synthesise an active Gemini in front of it. That way, the active Gemini would delete the shell, and not the gun. Anyway, it's much easier tha...

But a plot of every construction cycle will show the spaceship changing direction... periodically. Equally, one could argue that the switch engine travels horizontally for 48 generations, then vertically for another 48, which is what it certainly appears to do. Well, yes, one could argue that, but ...

orthogonally for 16 times the spaceship's period, then diagonally for 25 times the period Technically, that would be orthogonally for 16/41 of the period, and diagonally for 25/41 of the period. Yeah, that word "period" was a placeholder, and I forgot to go back and change it to something more prec...

Andrew Wade's Gemini satisfies all of these conditions. Are you sure? I think there's some room for interpretation here: 1) Technically there are no loops in a Gemini spaceship. (This is a lousy objection, I admit, and has an equally weaselly workaround: one could add a useless empty pair of 180-de...

This is a very useful script! It could make it significantly quicker to put together a gemini-shooting gun, though I would expect a gun firing Andrew's original gemini would be too large to run. In point of fact, I've gotten through a couple of design cycles for a Gemini gun now, and oddly enough i...

The number of unregistered users on conwaylife.com is steadily increasing, and my bet is that it is a direct consequence of the NewScientist article. Looks like Slashdot picked up the story shortly after you posted this, and the resulting download spike for Golly makes yesterday's surge look kind o...