This week's featured article
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| Recursive filter is a toolkit developed by Alexey Nigin in July 2015, which enables the construction of patterns with population growth that asymptotically matches an infinite number of different superlinear and sublinear functions. Toolkits enabling other sublinear infinite series had been completed by Dean Hickerson and Gabriel Nivasch in 2006 - see quadratic filter and exponential filter.
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In the news
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- 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.
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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 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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