Gustavo6046 wrote:Then who knows a cross 1 or loaf? They have pointy places, like many eaters, so the minimal damage is suffered while eating "rotten" gliders.
Not sure what you mean by a "cross 1" -- is it a period-3 oscillator, or a 24-cell still life? If you're thinking of the big symmetric four-overlapping-hats still life, then a beehive, boat or tub will be much smaller and will probably have a similar function.
"Minimal damage" doesn't mean much in the context of Conway's Life -- at least, you can't measure it by counting how many cells are different from what they should be. A one-cell difference is major damage for most still lifes, and loaves are no exception.
Subtract any single cell from a loaf, or add any single cell in the neighborhood of a loaf, and generally what you have is no longer a loaf: there's no plausible reaction that allows the loaf to recover.
Exceptions include the old standard eater3-type double loaf inversion, and the really surprising R-to-B and R-to-H converters. But in every one of these, every single cell in the loaf turns off during the reaction, so they're not really exceptions...!
At least for the R-to-B and the R-to-H, it's apparently just a matter of luck that a new loaf appears in the exact same place as the old loaf. If you look at enough reactions where still lifes get overrun by active reactions, eventually a few will show up where the same still life just happens to show up as leftover ash, in exactly the same location.
It doesn't seem to be too relevant whether such objects have pointy places on them or not. The only rule of thumb seems to be that if an object is common in random ash, it's more likely to show up as a transparent catalyst -- especially if it's symmetrical, since then it's more likely to show up in the correct orientation.