Quadratic replicator
A quadratic replicator is any pattern that fills all or part of the Life plane by making copies of itself in a superlinear way. Natural quadratic replicators are known in other Life-like rules, but so far no small or simple example has been found in Conway's Life.
In 2018 Adam P. Goucher completed the 0E0P metacell, a very large engineered pattern that is capable of quadratic growth along with many other growth rates, via its ability to emulate arbitrary patterns in any 2-state range-1 Moore neighborhood CA rule, either isotropic or anisotropic (excluding rules that include birth with zero neighbors).
DOGun SaGaQR
On November 29, 2021, Pavel Grankovskiy found a quadratic replicator that is about 64 times larger (in bounding box area) than the 0E0P metacell. It can run in Golly with 30 GB of memory. The repeat time is 3×223.[1]
"DOGun SaGaQR" ranked third place in the Pattern of the Year 2021 competition on the ConwayLife.com forums, tied with traffic stop, and behind Goldtiger997's self-synthesizing oblique loopship and reflectorless rotating oscillator constructions.[2]
It is a "shape-shifting" self-constructing pattern that can be trivially altered by one-tick adjustments to one key glider to make a predecessor of empty space ("D"=Diehard), a p100663296 [=3×225] oscillator ("O"=Oscillator),a 4-barrelled glider gun ("Gun"), an orthogonal c/24 spaceship ("S"=Spaceship), a single glider ("G"=Glider), or a quadratic-growth replicator ("QR"=Quadratic Replicator).
References
- ↑ Pavgran (November 29, 2021). Meet DOGun SaGaQR! (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
- ↑ Pavel Grankovskiy (April 6, 2022). Re: PotY 2020 Voting Thread (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
External links
- Quadratic replicator at the Life Lexicon