A space nonfiller is any pattern that expands indefinitely to affect all but finitely many cells in the Life plane, but leaves an expanding region of vacuum at its center. It is so named because the first known example is equivalent to a spacefiller that fills the plane with empty space.
The first nonfiller was discovered by Jason Summers on April 14, 1999:
In August 2020, Adam P. Goucher found that, by placing a die hard inside the empty space whose evolution covers the center of the nonfiller, a pattern can be constructed with the property that every cell in the universe (as opposed to all but finitely many cells) is alive at some point in the pattern's evolution but eventually turns dead permanently.[1]
In September 2021, Rocknlol found new patterns based on predecessors which separately break the records for smallest population (209) and bounding box (33 × 27) of a nonfiller.[2]