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This week's featured article A Garden of Eden is a pattern that has no parents and thus can only occur in generation 0. The term was first used in connection with cellular automata by John W. Tukey, many years before Conway's Game of Life was conceived. It was known from the start that Gardens of Eden exist in Life because of a theorem by Edward Moore that guarantees their existence in a wide class of cellular automata. The first Garden of Eden was found by Roger Banks and the MIT group in 1971. It had a bounding box of size 33 × 9 and 226 cells. Jean Hardouin-Duparc found the second and third Gardens of Eden by computer search in 1973, which had bounding boxes of size 122 × 6 and 117 × 6. His goal was to find Gardens of Eden with minimal height. In April 2016, Steven Eker found a Garden of Eden fitting inside a 5 × 83 bounding box. It is known that no Gardens of Eden exist with height less than 4, but the question is still open for height 4. Read more... In the news April 8: David Bell constructs and refines a puffer demonstrating that all sufficiently high c/4 diagonal rake periods are achievable. Matthias Merzenich uses this to construct a clean p3532+4N rake. March 31: Entity Valkyrie builds a complete 2c/3-wire-based pseudo-Heisenburp device with 742-tick repeat time. March 27-30: Entity Valkyrie completes a 2c/3 receiver with a repeat time of 876 ticks, which Adam P. Goucher eventually improves to 742 ticks using staged recovery mechanisms; the previous record-setting receivers needed 964 or 970 ticks to recover. March 20: Period1GliderGun discovers a period-26 bouncer-based reflector, the first independent reflector of this period, using components by Nico Brown and Dean Hickerson. March 19: Keith Amling constructs new p6 c/2 orthogonal greystretchers in which the stripes are bounded by extended tables. March 18: Nathaniel Johnston posts a YouTube video about the discovery of the true period-15 glider gun and period-16 glider gun, and the history leading up to those discoveries. March 17: James Pascua discovers the first period-16 90-degree independent reflector based on a suggestion by Matthias Merzenich, using the period-16 glider gun to hassle a honey farm predecessor and produce a banana spark. 90-degree reflectors are known for all periods except 14, 17, and 19 with periods 15, 23, and 26 having only dependent reflectors. March 16-17: Keith Amling completes a new c/4 diagonal unstable puffer engine (only the third known puffer engine at this speed) based on a partial result by Matthias Merzenich. Caleb R. Hilton uses sparkers to stabilise the unstable engine into explicit puffers. David Bell uses this engine to construct the first p52 c/4 diagonal rake, and "b3s23love" and Merzenich use it to substantially reduce the size of the p108 c/4 diagonal rake. Editable news item submissions page • Archive • Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1670 patterns (including 691 oscillators, 176 spaceships and 381 still lifes); 3760 images (609 animated and 3151 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 958 patterns. Download pattern collection 2 MB .zip archive containing the 1500+ RLE pattern files used on the wiki

Did you know... ... that there is roughly one chance in 10^(N/3) that a still life appearing out of random soup will have a population of exactly N cells? ... that the number of still lifes with N+1 bits is roughly 2.48 times larger than the number of N-bit still lifes? ... that the odds of a randomly-chosen 20 × 20 soup pattern being a methuselah that lasts between N and N + 1000 ticks, are roughly the same as the odds that it will last any amount of time longer than N + 1000 ticks? ... that all still lifes up to 17 cells can be synthesized at a cost of less than one glider per cell? ... that the first elementary knightship, Sir Robin, was discovered only in 2018, with there having been a very close call in 2004? ... that there is a 5 × 2 counterexample to the Coolout Conjecture, proving that patterns that are internally compatible with stability can not always be made part of a larger still life, no matter what cells are added around the edges? ... that a Conway's Life pattern representing a complete programmable 8-bit computer, consisting only of buckaroos, p60 glider guns, and glider duplicators, was completed in November 2016? ... that whilst no elementary oblique spaceships were found in B3/S23 until 2018, and none have occurred naturally, at least two naturally occurring reactions have been discovered in B38/S23 that travel in an oblique direction? ... that not all statorless oscillators are phoenixes, but statorless period 2 oscillators must be phoenixes? ... that no pattern inside a 6 × 6 bounding box is a Garden of Eden?           Showing 10 items out of 104 More did you know...