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Welcome to LifeWiki, the wiki for Conway's Game of Life. Currently contains 2,635 articles.

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Today's featured article 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. Read more... In the news September 26: EvinZL notices that a catalyst used in one of Simon Ekstrom's H-to-Gs from July 29 solves a very long-standing limitation of the stable F171 conduit, reducing its repeat time from 227 ticks to as low as 120. September 14: Mitchell Riley finds Lx65 duplicator, a record-breaking elementary Herschel fanout device -- a stable Spartan variant of the known Lx65 conduit, which until now has generally needed sparker support. September 4: vilc makes available (via a published script) a general synthesis method for all members of the longN clock family of p2 oscillators. September 2-4: 400spartans discovers a population-184 solution to the unique father problem with a self-forcing patch containing 283 specified (both on and off) cells and fitting in a 16 × 20 bounding box, each of these statistics being the smallest known. Matthias Merzenich notes that a self-forcing patch with as few as 271 specified cells exists for this still life. September 1: The Spacefiller synthesis wins the 2023 Pattern of the Year competition. August 29: Carson Cheng completes a new smallest period-74 gun based on a partial result by Mitchell Riley. August 26: David Raucci discovers a surprising period-96 B-heptomino hassler that combines the functionality of p45 and p51 hasslers found by Period1GliderGun a day earlier. August 23: Hippo.69 completes the RCT15 optimization project, reducing the tape length by roughly a factor of three from the first working RCT15 pattern -- and now constructing a working spacefiller instead of Alan Hensel's decimal counter. August 19: After a quick sequence of syntheses by several contributors, May13 assembles a recipe for the final unsynthesized 22-bit still life, xs22_8k487p8z39c321; the 22-bit synthesis project is now complete. Editable news item submissions page • Archive •

Did you know... ... 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?           Showing 10 items out of 180 More did you know... Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1714 patterns (including 700 oscillators, 203 spaceships and 374 still lifes); 3733 images (608 animated and 3125 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 986 patterns. Download pattern collection 6MB .zip archive containing the 5200+ Game of Life RLE pattern files used on the wiki Also available: 38KB .zip archive containing approximately 75 pattern files for other cellular automata