Syringe

Syringe
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Pattern type	Converter
Number of cells	66
Bounding box	24 × 34
Static symmetry	Unspecified
Discovered by	Tanner Jacobi
Year of discovery	2015
Glider synthesis Fewest gliders 10 Uploaded synthesis RLE syringeGtoH_synth.rle
Pattern files Plaintext syringeGtoH.cells RLE syringeGtoH.rle

The syringe is a glider-to-Herschel converter composed of an eater 1, a block, a beehive with tail, and a large welded still life that combines an eater 2 and an eater 5. It works by converting a bait block into a pi, then hassling the pi into a B-heptomino that restores the bait block over the course of its evolution. Its repeat time is 78, but it can also "overclock" to function with glider streams of period 74 or 75. The syringe was named by Jeremy Tan, describing how it injects a glider into a Herschel system.

The syringe allows much more compactness and timing versatility in signal circuitry than Herschel conduits alone, and in combination with the snark, it can largely replace very long Herschel tracks (if they are not required to be spartan) by simply passing a glider from somewhere near the start to somewhere near the destination. This works similarly to Herschel transmitters and receivers, but in more flexible way. Within 3 days of the syringe's discovery, over half of all known guns from periods 14 to 999 were obsoleted by loops involving a syringe and various snarks.

A variant of the syringe that replaces the welded eater 2 and eater 5 with a separate eater 1 and eater 2 was used in the Demonoid, a self-constructing spaceship.

The syringe was voted on ConwayLife.com as Pattern Of The Year 2015.

See also

• Snark
• Herschel receiver
• Herschel transmitter