This week's featured article
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Demonoid is the first type of self-constructing diagonal spaceship in the B3/S23 rule. A small "0hd Demonoid" was completed by Chris Cain in December 2015, shortly after a much larger 10hd version constructed in November in collaboration with Dave Greene.
The 0hd spaceship displaces itself by 65 cells diagonally every 438,852 generations. As of 2018 it is the only case where a spaceship gun pattern was completed before the actual spaceship -- the first 0hd Demonoid was fired by a gun. Unlike its Gemini predecessor, removal of old construction arms is not done by a separate destruction arm, but rather by "self-destruct circuitry" -- a scattering of still lifes that allow a single glider to cleanly destroy the entire mechanism, as shown at right.
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In the news
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- March 18: Results for the 2020 Pattern of the Year competition include a tie for first place between the Bandersnatch and the Speed Demonoid.
- March 17: A small synthesis efficiency improvement project, 12-in-7 (12-bit still lifes constructed with 7 gliders or less) is completed, with 13 expensive syntheses reduced to below the target cost in less than a week.
- March 17: Pattern of the Year voting, on a record-breaking thirty-nine entries for 2020, will close on March 17th.
- March 12: The 20-bit still life glider synthesis project is completed.
- March 7-8: Goldtiger997 completes a 215-glider recipe for 72P4H1V0, the second c/4 orthogonal spaceship to be synthesized.
- February 10-11: Chris Rowett uses ikpx2 to discover several new moving objects, including a p120 2c/5 puffer and c/5 diagonal tubstretcher, tagalong, and spaceship.
- February 4-11: Tanner Jacobi, EvinZL, Louis-François Handfield and Sphenocorona find new Herschel-to-glider converters and variants of existing H-to-Gs: NW26T157b, NE30T17_NE1T22, NW10T137, SW-18T136 and a Spartan SE16T36b.
- January 11-March 8: Hartmut Holzwart completes several new chicken wire greyships with different widths of chicken wire, with specific examples constructed for widths 2 through 12 among others.
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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 there are dozens of known Cordership variants, including puffers, rakes and wickstretchers, with periods of any multiple of 96?
- ... that greyships have been constructed with speeds of c/2, c/3, c/4, c/5, and 2c/5?
- ... that most greyships travel parallel to the stripes in their included agars, but a few travel perpendicular to the stripes, or "against the grain"?
- ... that a pattern has been constructed that calculates and prints out the digits of pi in decimal, and a similar one prints out the decimal digits of the Golden Ratio?
- ... that several different patterns have been constructed to calculate and display the sequence of prime numbers, and some have been adapted to display only twin primes or Fermat primes?
- ... that two completely different types of oblique spaceships, the waterbear and the half-baked knightship, were constructed in 2014?
- ... that no Caterpillar-type spaceships were completed for almost ten years after the original Caterpillar was constructed in 2004, but that two different designs, the waterbear and the centipede, were finished in 2014?
- ... that the first spiral-growth pattern in Conway's Life was constructed in 2014?
- ... that among known glider recipes for irreducible objects, the Gemini spaceship has the largest known minimal recipe, currently 173,449 gliders — the runner-up being the Parallel HBK with a 38,380-glider synthesis?
- ... 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?
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