The rectifier is a stable 180° gliderreflector made up of two eater 1s, a block, a beehive, and an eater 3. The normal tub-stabilised eater 3 can be used here to reduce the population, but the snake-stabilised eater 3 has a smaller bounding box. The rectifier is notable for its recovery time of 106 generations and small number of catalysts. It can replace the boojum reflector in a large number of instances, although in some cases it cannot fit into the space provided due to the transparency of the beehive. It has several advantages over the boojum reflector:
it has a much lower recovery time, allowing certain guns to be compacted;
its passive bounding box is slightly smaller, so it can further compact many glider guns;
its output path is free of catalysts, enabling it to be used as a merge device.
The transparent beehive reaction was discovered by Paul Callahan in 1996.
Rectifier reflecting a p106 glider stream, shown with highlighted reaction envelope. A second rectifier is present outside the frame, forming a loop with five gliders (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE:herePlaintext:here
Gallery
An incoming glider (in green) and an outgoing glider (in red) 167 generations later
