This week's featured article
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A sawtooth is a finite pattern whose population grows without bound but does not tend to infinity. In other words, it is a pattern with population that reaches new heights infinitely often, but also infinitely often drops below some fixed value. Their name comes from the fact that their plot of population versus generation number looks roughly like an ever-increasing sawtooth graph.
The first sawtooth was constructed by Dean Hickerson in April 1991 by using a loaf tractor beam (a technique that was also used in the construction of sawtooth 633). The least infinitely repeating population of any known sawtooth is 177, attained by Sawtooth 177; the smallest bounding box of any known sawtooth is 62 × 56, attained by a variant of the same pattern, Sawtooth 195.
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In the news
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Pattern collection
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| The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find:
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Did you know...
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- ... 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?
- ... there are 'Heisenburp' reactions which can detect the passage of a glider without affecting it in any way?
- ... Corderships can be constructed using individual switch engines placed arbitrarily far from each other, that will still support each other using intermediary gliders and stable objects?
- ... fuses can be made that burn arbitrarily slowly, based on sending spaceships back and forth between two rows of stable objects?
- ... that there exist lone dot agars consisting of isolated cells in every generation?
- ... that some types of spaceship, but not all, support stable Heisenburp technology, where an arrangement of still lifes detects the passage of the spaceship, emits a signal, and returns to its original state?
- ... that, while it is impossible to build a true stable Heisenburp device that detects a passing glider without even temporarily affecting it, there are several known stable pseudo-Heisenburp devices?
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