Sparking eater
A sparking eater is one of two eaters found in April 1997 and November 1998 by Dean Hickerson using his dr search program, shown below to the left and right respectively. These both absorb gliders as a standard eater does, but also produce separated single-bit corner dot sparks at the upper right, which can be used to delete antiparallel gliders with different phases as shown.
In general it can mean any eater that produces a glider-eating spark.
| (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
The above mechanisms can be used to build intermitting glider guns. The left-hand eater produces a spark nine ticks after a glider impact, with the result that the period of the constituent guns can't be a multiple of 4. The right-hand eater produces the same spark ten ticks after impact, which allows p4N guns to be used.
The separation of the spark also allows this reaction to perform other perturbations "around the corner" of some objects. For example, it was used by Jason Summers in 2004 to cap the ends of a row of ten AK47 reactions to form a much smaller period-94 glider gun than the original one (see P94S). Both are now made obsolete by the AK-94.
The sparks can also be used to create LCM oscillators when a sparker is placed near the eater and the input is from a glider gun.
External links
- Sparking eater at the Life Lexicon