This week's featured article
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| HighLife is a Life-like cellular automaton in which cells survive from one generation to the next if they have 2 or 3 neighbours, and are born if they have 3 or 6 neighbours; that is, it has rulestring "B36/S23". It was named by John Conway and was first considered in 1994 by Nathan Thompson. It is mainly of interest due to a simple replicator that it allows.
Because its rulestring is so similar to that of Conway's Game of Life, many simple patterns exhibit the same behavior in both rules; it's only when patterns get complex that their behavior differs. Nonetheless, it exhibits such rich structure that Conway himself stated
"It seems to me that 'B36/S23' is really the game I should have found, since it's so rich in nice things."
All of the most common still lifes, oscillators and spaceships from the standard Life rules behave the exact same under the HighLife rules, including the block, beehive, blinker, glider, lightweight spaceship, middleweight spaceship, and heavyweight spaceship. On the other hand, even though traffic lights and honey farms themselves behave the same in both rules, they do not occur naturally in HighLife with any sort of regularity due to their common predecessors being unstable.
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In the news
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- January 16: Adam P. Goucher completes a 2c/5 waveguide for an oblique line of ants based on a partial result by Matthias Merzenich.
- January 10: Alex Greason makes available a fresh set of transfer.py results. Fewer than 535 20-bit still lifes have no known glider synthesis, and 135 of these have soups available on Catagolue to assist with synthesis.
- January 10: Dylan Chen discovers 328P7H3V0, another new 3c/7 spaceship, using Andrew J. Wade's December update to LSSS. This is the first small 3c/7 spaceship with gutter symmetry.
- January 9: Rob Liston discovers 50093M, the longest-lasting known methuselah within a 16×16 bounding box, using apgsearch.
- January 5: Bullet51 uses ikpx2 to find a third elementary c/6 diagonal spaceship, 282P6H1V1.
- January 5: Martin Grant discovers a new variant of a known H-to-G conduit, NE16T14, with likely applications as a reflector and merge circuit in single-channel self-constructing circuitry.
- January 5: Sphenocorona and Luka Okanishi assemble a new elementary conduit, HF96P, which allows for the creation of several new Herschel-to-glider converters.
- January 2-3: bubblegum discovers a new 3c/7 orthogonal puffer engine, allowing Matthias Merzenich and iNoMed to construct the first clean 3c/7 rake.
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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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Did you know...
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- ... there are 'Heisenburp' reactions which can detect the passage of a glider without affecting it in any way?
- ... Corderships can be constructed using individual switch engines placed arbitrarily far from each other, that will still support each other using intermediary gliders and stable objects?
- ... fuses can be made that burn arbitrarily slowly, based on sending spaceships back and forth between two rows of stable objects?
- ... there exist 'lone dot' agars consisting of isolated cells in every generation?
- ... that some types of spaceship, but not all, support stable Heisenburp technology, where an arrangement of still lifes detects the passage of the spaceship, emits a signal, and returns to its original state?
- ... that, while it is impossible to build a true stable Heisenburp device that detects a passing glider without even temporarily affecting it, there are several known stable pseudo-Heisenburp devices?
- ... that the name of the Bandersnatch, a color-changing lane-shifter device discovered in 2020, is derived from a Lewis Carroll poem that also supplied names for the Snark, the boojum reflector, and the Bellman search utility?
- ... that the first rake that produces spaceships travelling in the same direction but slower was found in 2003, using a c/2 rake to produce 2c/5 spaceships?
- ... that it is possible for a single Life object to simulate the evolution of an arbitrary number of other Life objects at the same time (although at increasingly slower speeds)?
- ... that the Fast Forward Force Field reaction can transport an LWSS 11 spaces in 6 generations, creating the illusion of super-light-speed travel?
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