This week's featured article
|
| Simkin glider gun is a glider gun, found by Michael Simkin on April 28, 2015. It consists of a Herschel running in two period-60 conduits, producing infinite copies of the first natural glider. In terms of its single-barreled form it is the smallest known gun, with 36 cells, sharing the record with the Gosper glider gun. In its pseudo-period, boat-bit form and its double-barrelled form it is the absolute record holder, with 35 and 29 cells respectively.
|
In the news
|
- December 2: FWKnightship constructs a (6,3)c/1024 knightship caterpillar with an almost completely new support mechanism, re-using only the over-unity glider production mechanism from the half-baked knightship.
- November 29: Charity Engine discovers a new longest-lasting known natural diehard, a 16 × 16 soup lasting 1,413 generations before completely dying out, via apgsearch.
- November 22: Keith Amling proves that 37P4H1V0 is the unique smallest possible period-4 c/4 orthogonal spaceship in terms of its minimum population of 37 cells.
- November 18-December 2: David Bell extends earlier work on period-116 c/4 spaceships and c/4 rakes by EvinZL and May13, respectively.
- November 16: Several people extend a new beehive factory partial by Mitchell Riley to produce conduits, usually with repeat time 90, that convert gliders to other active objects.
- November 15: Keith Amling proves that 30P5H2V0 is the unique smallest possible period-5 2c/5 orthogonal spaceship in terms of its minimum population of 30 cells.
- November 14: Mitchell Riley discovers 44P49, the smallest known period-49 oscillator, which quickly leads to a number of related SKOP records being broken.
- November 12-13: Keith Amling completes a census of all period-3 ships up to 49 cells and all period-2 ships up to 80 cells which discovers 6 new c/3 ships and proves that 64P2H1V0 is the smallest possible period-2 ship.
- November 8-10: Keith Amling discovers a high-clearance variant of a known p28 c/4 diagonal puffer and combines two such engines to form a p116 puffer. Two days later, praosylen modifies the p116 puffer to form a dirty rake and Evin uses this dirty rake to construct a clean p116 rake. The previous lowest known c/4 diagonal rake period was 4508.
|
Pattern collection
|
| The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find:
|
|
Did you know...
|
- ... that a spaceship made of spaceships was only a theoretical concept in Conway's Life (except for 0E0P metacell patterns that were much too large to run) until an explicit universal constructor based example was constructed in 2021?
- ... that glider constructions for the B29, X66, half-X66 with HWSS, Pushalong 1, 25P3H1V0.1, 30P5H2V0, 30P4H2V0, a pufferfish spaceship, and the weekender were discovered in 2015 — more than twice as many new spaceship recipes as had been completed in the entire previous decade?
- ... that in 2014 and 2015 alone, more new spaceship syntheses have been completed than were found in all the years between 1970 and 2013?
- ... that as of September 2023 there are 253 different still lifes known to be constructible by colliding four or fewer gliders, but this list is almost certainly not complete?
- ... that in 2014 a new natural infinite growth pattern was discovered, starting from a symmetric random starting configuration?
- ... that the first self-constructing Conway's Life pattern was built in 2010?
- ... that the first glider synthesis for a c/3 spaceship was completed in 2014?
- ... that the first "macro-spaceship" gun (a Gemini spaceship gun) was constructed in 2010, followed by the HBK gun in January 2015 and a Demonoid gun in December 2015?
- ... that the waterbear was the first known high-speed oblique spaceship, many orders of magnitude faster than Gemini spaceships and half-baked knightships?
- ... that there are no known direct reflectors for lightspeed wire signals, or for signals in 2c/3 wires, but that very large reflectors for these signals can be constructed using stable or periodic circuitry?
|
|
