Waterbear

Waterbear
View static image
Pattern type	Spaceship
Number of cells	197896
Bounding box	13295 × 28010
Direction	oblique
Period	158 (mod: Unknown)
Speed	(23,5)c/79 | Unknown
Heat	Unknown
Kinetic symmetry	Unspecified
Discovered by	Brett Berger
Year of discovery	2014
Rules Outer-totalistic rules B3/S23 only # of rules 20 = 1
Pattern files Zip archive waterbear.zip

Waterbear is an oblique spaceship discovered by Brett Berger on December 28, 2014. It is the smallest (in terms of bounding box) known oblique spaceship, superseding parallel HBK. It is also the first discovered "fast" oblique spaceship in Conway's Game of Life.

The helix, fanout devices and syntheses for the helix were found by Ivan Fomichev.

Design

The base reaction consists of a Herschel running on a track of gliders. The Herschel consumes a southwest glider and emits two gliders, one southwest and the other southeast, every 79 generations. Interactions between neighboring tracks are used to create the necessary components to recreate the helix.

Being made from gliders, the track gradually moves away from the helix, giving rise to the triangular bodies. To prevent the ship from growing exponentially in size, the same procedure used to build the helix is used to "reset" the track at two points, resulting in three smaller triangles instead of one much larger one. This reset comes at the cost of a fair amount of output-suppressing cleanup, so the Waterbear design balances the exponential growth and the constant cleanup cost to achieve a reasonably small final area.

Video

Click to load content A demonstration of the spaceship in motion

See also

• Caterpillar
• Gemini
• Parallel HBK