Today's featured article
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Eater 1 (or fishhook or simply eater) was the first discovered eater. Its ability to eat various objects was discovered by Bill Gosper in 1971. It is the smallest still life that is neither radially symmetric nor symmetric through a line, and it is the thirteenth most common still life, being less common than mango but more common than long barge.
It only takes four generations to recover from being hit by a glider, making it the fastest-recovering glider eater, and it is also the smallest glider eater. As such, it appears as a stabilizer at the corner of dozens of oscillators including Jason's p22, buckaroo, p54 shuttle, pentoad, p47 pre-pulsar shuttle, and snacker.
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In the news
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Did you know...
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- ... that an O(sqrt(log(t))) pattern was constructed in 2010, with a diameter that grows at the slowest possible asymptotic ("big O") rate for any Life pattern?
- ... that since the first Cordership was assembled from 13 switch engines in 1991, the number of switch engines required has gradually decreased, with a 2-engine Cordership finally making its appearance in 2017?
- ... that the bounding box and recovery time of the current fastest stable reflector, Mike Playle's Snark, are both more than two full orders of magnitude smaller than the first stable reflector, constructed by Paul Callahan in 1996?
- ... that as of 2022, no finite elementary replicators have been found in Life?
- ... that while multiple c/12 diagonal spaceships are known, all of them actually travel at some multiple of 8c/96 diagonal - no pure c/12 diagonal technology is known?
- ... that the first p23 oscillator, David Hilbert, was created as a modification of a "troll" pattern posted a week earlier?
- ... that exactly two years after a fake loafer-producing soup was posted to the forums on April Fools' Day, a real soup was found on April 1, 2020?
- ... patterns have been constructed whose fate is currently unknown (based on the twin primes and Collatz conjectures)?
- ... a pattern of 44 cells exists whose population grows by exactly one cell each generation?
- ... it is possible to send a signal from one side to the other of an infinite diagonal line of cells without destroying the line?
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Pattern collection
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The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find:
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