Today's featured article
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| The speed tunnel is a stable glider-to-Herschel converter discovered by Tanner Jacobi on July 24, 2022. It is composed of a transparent block, an eater 1, a bait loaf, an eater bridge eater, an unnamed 19-cell catalyst, and a beehive push catalyst. The glider-loaf collision would make a block on its own, but it is perturbed and turns into a pi-heptomino, then becoming a B-heptomino while restoring the bait loaf, finally yielding a Herschel and restoring the transparent block. In the pattern shown in the infobox, a ghost Herschel marks the output location.
Its repeat time is 61 ticks due to a spark from the beehive push reaction. To prevent interference of the output's first natural glider at a separation of 61 or 62 ticks, a variant of tub-with-tail eater can be used to replace half of the eater bridge eater.
The low repeat time makes speed tunnel a faster alternative to the syringe, which has a repeat time of 78 ticks and overclock periods of 74 and 75.
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In the news
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- November 18: AlbertArmStain discovers a small, direct H-to-MWSS conduit with a repeat time of 141 generations. Period1GliderGun and Lucy D'Agostino subsequently find variants that reduce the repeat time to 120 generations.
- November 3: Lucy D'Agostino discovers a new set of connectable Spartan converters with E-heptomino inputs, further expanding the set of known E-heptomino conduits.
- November 2: iNoMed finds a way to use stable catalysts to make a p2 traffic jam wire turn a 90-degree corner with no help from sparkers.
- October 28-30: Entity Valkyrie builds the first known true period-47 glider gun based on a partial result by iNoMed, after which the bounding box is reduced by more than a factor of four by several contributors over the next two days, from 311 × 289 down to Luka Okanishi's greatly simplified design at 147 × 144.
- October 20: FWKnightship completes a redesigned (34,7)c/156 spaceship with a bounding box of (52514, 158980) and minimum population of 655,594; this is less than 1/38th of the population and less than 1/6000th of the area of the previous version of this spaceship constructed by Luka Okanishi last year.
- October 10: AlbertArmstain rebuilds an initial stage from Mitchell Riley's H-to-Gs into a Herschel-to-B-heptomino converter; Lucy D'Agostino notices that this is actually a known E-heptomino converter appended to a previously unknown Herschel-to-E converter, HRx93E -- which enables completely new Spartan Herschel conduits Rx155 and R194, among other things.
- October 10: Mitchell Riley's "LightCone" search program finds several new Spartan Herschel-to-glider converters.
- October 9: Tanner Jacobi reduces the cost of the synthesis for B29 from 25 to 16 gliders, using QuFince to avoid scaffolding.
- October 9: Chris857 finds a synthesis for popover.
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Did you know...
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- ... that it was shown in 2014 that any salvo of gliders, no matter how tightly packed, can be constructed by crashing together gliders whose initial positions are farther apart than any chosen finite distance?
- ... that no spaceships with velocities other than c/4 diagonal (glider), c/2 orthogonal (*WSS variants), and c/12 diagonal (Corderships) had known glider syntheses until 2003, when a 2c/5 spaceship gun was constructed?
- ... that after ten years with no new small spaceship syntheses, a glider construction was found for the c/7 loafer in 2013 less than three hours after its discovery?
- ... 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?
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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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