SMOS

A SMOS (Spaceship Made Of Spaceships) is a spaceship in a cellular automaton, consisting of multiple other spaceships colliding with each other, causing a reaction to take place where the spaceships are regenerated separately, all displaced by the same distance. Such spaceship conglomerations can be, on rare occasions, SMOS'ed again together to create a SMOSMOS (Spaceship Made of Spaceships Made of Spaceships). Ships used in SMOSes must also work as normal spaceships by themselves, with a different speed and/or direction of travel from the complete SMOS.

A stricter definition of SMOS requires the ships used in the SMOS to be allowed to go through 1 full oscillation cycle before interacting with the other.

Elementary Example in OCA

The T-tetromino is a spaceship in a large range of isotropic non-totalistic rules (for example tlife), as shown in Panel 1 below. It can be used to create many kinds of SMOS, one of which is shown in Panel 2. This particular SMOS, one of the simplest known, can also collide with another copy of itself in the specific rule B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 to generate a SMOSMOS (Panel 3).

x = 3, y = 4, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 bo$obo2$3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ GPS 4 AUTOSTART THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 2 TRACKLOOP 5 0 -1/5 ]] Panel 1: T-tetromino (Catagolue: here) (click above to open LifeViewer)

→

x = 8, y = 8, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 obo$o2bo$obo2$6bo$5bobo2$5b3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ GPS 8 AUTOSTART THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 2 TRACKLOOP 18 -1/-18 -1/18 ]] Panel 2: SMOS (Catagolue: here) (click above to open LifeViewer)

→

x = 8, y = 22, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 5b3o2$5bobo$6bo2$obo$o2bo$obo7$obo$o2bo$obo2$6bo$5bobo2$5b3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ GPS 16 AUTOSTART THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 2 TRACKLOOP 92 -6/-92 -0 ]] Panel 3: SMOSMOS (Catagolue: here) (click above to open LifeViewer)

Engineered example in Game of Life

On August 2, 2021, Goldtiger997 constructed a (16461006,16460963)c/75568091 "self-synthesising" spaceship based on a design from Dave Greene, providing the first explicit SMOS in regular Life. In some phases, this oblique loopship consists of 144,221 gliders: a two-glider collision synthesizing a block, two identical salvoes of 72,109 gliders following each other on the same lane -- and a single trigger glider that is offset 62 lanes from the single-channel stream, which is responsible for igniting the wick of the crabstretcher that produces the faraway target that is converted into the next pair of colliding gliders.

External links

• Spaceships made up of other spaceships (SMOS) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums