Half-baked knightship

Half-baked knightship
Half-baked knightship image
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Pattern type	Spaceship
Number of cells	1049396
Bounding box	450801 × 461227
Direction	slope 2
Period	2621440 (mod: Unknown)
Speed	3c/1310720 | Unknown
Heat	Unknown
Kinetic symmetry	Unspecified
Discovered by	Adam P. Goucher
Year of discovery	2014
Rules Outer-totalistic rules B3/S23 only # of rules 20 = 1

Half-baked knightship is a class of knightships based on the well-known half-bakery reaction with a glider. Representatives of this class are currently the smallest known oblique spaceships in Conway's Game of Life both in terms of the bounding box and minimum population, leaving Gemini and its derivatives, the only formerly known oblique spaceships, out of reach. A half-baked knightship with the minimum population of as few as 132,946 cells, the period of 245,912 generations and the bounding box of 31,080×32,771 cells is known.

Components and slow salvo syntheses for the ship were found by the combined efforts of Chris Cain, Ivan Fomichev and Dave Greene. Adam P. Goucher proposed the base design for the ship and wrote a Golly script that can put the components together into a working knightship of any sufficiently large period. Several days later, Chris Cain wrote an alternative assembly script that took advantage of superior components, that had already been known, and built a half-baked knightship an order of magnitude smaller.

In May 2014 Ivan Fomichev found the key reactions, which allow long chains of half-bakeries to regenerate themselves at (6, 3), and also to regenerate seed constellations at one end of the ship. When triggered, the seeds produce the small glider salvos that mediate the (6, 3) offset reaction.

Like the (2,1) self-reconstructor, this knightship moves very slowly, but unlike a self-reconstructor, only a tiny fraction of the half-baked knightship has an embedded construction recipe. The half-bakery chains encode a small slow salvo recipe, but the positions of the half-bakeries are not encoded anywhere else.

See also

• Caterpillar
• Gemini