Main Page

Welcome to LifeWiki, the wiki for Conway's Game of Life. Currently contains 2,157 articles.

Guns Methuselahs Oscillators

Puffers Spaceships Still lifes

Wicks All patterns Everything else

This week's featured article Eater 1 (or fishhook or simply eater) was the first discovered eater. Its ability to eat various objects was discovered by Bill Gosper in 1971. It is the smallest still life that is neither radially symmetric nor symmetric through a line, and it is the thirteenth most common still life, being less common than mango but more common than long barge. It only takes four generations to recover from being hit by a glider, making it the fastest-recovering glider eater, and it is also the smallest glider eater. As such, it appears as a stabilizer at the corner of dozens of oscillators including 36P22, buckaroo, P54 shuttle, pentoad, pre-pulsar shuttle 47, and snacker. Read more... In the news Feb. 9: Rob Liston discovers a new p16 oscillator, Rob's p16, using apgsearch. It is the smallest known p16 by both population and bounding box, the first p16 to appear from an asymmetric soup, the first strictly volatile p16, and the first new rotor to be discovered by asymmetric soup search since the 1980s. Feb. 8: All 19-bit still lifes are confirmed to have valid glider syntheses. Jan. 26: Dave Greene creates LifeSuper, an extended version of LifeHistory for advanced pattern notation. Jan. 26: Entity Valkyrie constructs a period-11040 spider gun, the first gun to fire a c/5 orthogonal spaceship. Editable news item submissions page • Archive • @conwaylife on Twitter Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1353 patterns (including 520 oscillators, 126 spaceships and 337 still lifes); 2294 images (512 animated and 1782 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 736 patterns. Download pattern collection 2 MB .zip archive containing the 1500+ RLE pattern files used on the wiki

Did you know... ... that there are 71 distinct ways for two gliders to collide, but it is unknown how many distinct 3-glider collisions there are? ... that to display the smallest known gun pattern for a Gemini spaceship at 1 cell = 1 pixel, on a standard-density video monitor, a screen over one mile square would be needed? ... that no odd-period glider guns were known before 1995, when a period 565 p5-spark-assisted B-heptomino loop was constructed by David Buckingham? ... that even though the speed limit for spaceships is c/2 in a vacuum, in a medium of stripes agar there are "spaceships" that can travel at lightspeed along the stripes, or two thirds of lightspeed perpendicular to the stripes? ... that the smallest known spacefiller pattern consists of 187 cells? ... that the smallest known sawtooth pattern in Conway's Life consists of only 177 cells? ... that there are now over a hundred and twenty known Herschel conduits, counting stable conduits only, and a much larger number if oscillator-supported conduits are included? ... that Demonoids, Caterloopillars, Orthogonoids, half-bakery knightships, loopships and camelships are the only known types of spaceships with fixed slope but adjustable speed -- not counting 0E0P metacell-based patterns? ... that a pattern exists in which no cell in the unbounded Life plane ever becomes periodic? ... that several different universal constructors in Conway’s Life have been shown to be capable of constructing their own circuitry?           Showing 10 items out of 102 More did you know...