This week's featured article
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| An eater is any still life that has the ability to interact with certain patterns without suffering any permanent damage. The term may also sometimes specifically refer to eater 1, a very common and well-known eater. The block was the first known eater, being found to be capable of eating beehives from a queen bee, allowing the construction of the queen bee shuttle. The animation to the right shows an eater 5 feasting on an incoming stream of gliders.
Eaters are extremely important, as they help stabilize and control debris created by complex reactions, allowing for the manipulation of the useful parts of those reactions. Stable reflectors in particular heavily rely on a variety of eaters to work.
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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 hitting a pre-block with a glider on a certain lane can output either an LWSS or MWSS, depending only on a one-tick change in the timing?
- ... that the clock is almost 5,000 times rarer than the toad, despite both having 6 cells and fitting in a 4 × 4 bounding box?
- ... that the quadpole is more common than the tripole in random soup, due to a relatively common bottleneck reaction involving a century variant hitting a ship?
- ... that a half blockade can be struck by a single glider to produce a three-block constellation that becomes its mirror image when hit by another glider, while also releasing another glider in the same direction?
- ... that a series of increasingly larger greyships, starting with Canada Grey, can all be constructed incrementally by colliding gliders with a gradually accreting still life target?
- ... that oblique puffers and rakes based on elementary spaceships were unknown in Conway's Life until Dylan Chen and Adam P. Goucher constructed combinations of sprayer knightships in May 2021?
- ... that a configuration of two ponds and two blocks recovers back to its original position when sparked in a certain way, allowing for the creation of some period multipliers?
- ... that the third-smallest unique-period gun (at the time) was discovered just six hours after the second-smallest unique-period gun, despite the two being completely unrelated?
- ... that despite 22P36 having been known since 1995, one half of it was not generalized to a versatile traffic stop catalyst until 26 years later?
- ... that Merzenich's p64 and 32P21 are both hassling two beehives and two R-pentominoes, and 56P27 hassles four of each?
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