This week's featured article
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| The OTCA metapixel is a 2048 × 2048 period 35328 unit cell that was constructed by Brice Due from Fall 2005 through Spring 2006. It has many advantages over the previous-known unit cells such as the p5760 unit Life cell and deep cell, including the ability to emulate any Life-like cellular automaton and the fact that, when zoomed out, the ON and OFF cells are easy to distinguish.
It is designed to run quickly under the HashLife algorithm, and thus Golly is generally used to view and/or manipulate meta-patterns made up of OTCA metapixels (and some such patterns even come packaged with Golly).
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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 24 ten-cell patterns exhibit infinite growth, with 17 unique pattern types, but that it has been proven that no nine-cell pattern exhibits infinite growth?
- ... that all still lifes up to 21 bits have a known glider synthesis, but that there is a 306-cell still life that cannot be synthesised, so there is a population threshold between these at which not all still lifes can be constructed?
- ... that the French kiss remained without a glider synthesis until 2013, and there are still fourteen 17-bit p2s that have not been successfully synthesized?
- ... that Adam P. Goucher's distributed Catagolue soup-search project, started in February 2015, has tested several orders of magnitude more random soups than any previous such project, and has contributed to the reduction of many glider construction recipes?
- ... that with the appearance of the 0E0P metacell, the number of periods for which strict volatility 1 oscillators were known went from 12 to infinity?
- ... that Copperhead is not only the first c/10 orthogonal spaceship ever found, but also remarkably compact for a pattern not discovered until 2016?
- ... that loafer is the fifth smallest non-flotilla spaceship, but was discovered 43 years after the four spaceships smaller than it?
- ... that despite being the fourth smallest non-flotilla orthogonal spaceship, loafer did not appear from a single randomly generated soup until 2020?
- ... that all known glider eaters take at least four ticks to recover to their original state after eating a glider?
- ... that among Life-like (outer-totalistic) rules, Conway's Life near neighbors B35/S23 and B36/S23 are not explosive, but B37/S23 is?
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