Conduit

A conduit is an arrangement of still lifes and/or oscillators that move an active reaction to another location without themselves being permanently damaged. The chaotic object may be transformed into a different chaotic object in the process, but no permanent debris may be left behind. Alternatively, gliders or other spaceships may be accepted as inputs and/or emitted as outputs; any emitted spaceships will either abandon the site of their creation, or can be absorbed by eaters. Probably the most important conduit is Conduit 1, in which a B-heptomino is transformed into a Herschel in 59 generations.

Herschel conduits

Main article: Herschel conduit

The most prolific stable conduits are those which rotate, reflect or translate a Herschel in a certain number of generations. Oscillators of all periods ≥ 57 can be built using these elementary conduits. All except the smallest stable reflectors use Herschel conduits, some of the counter-examples being the Snark, rectifier, and Boojum reflector.

B-heptomino and other conduits

There are other conduits that move objects other than the Herschel, objects like the B-heptomino, R-pentomino, or the century. These conduits are no less useful than Herschel conduits, and some Herschel conduits are made up of two or more different conduits transforming the signal.

As of November 2023, there are 15 objects that are "officially" recognized as conduit signals. Those objects are:

• the R-pentomino (abbreviated as R)
• the B-heptomino (abbreviated as B)
• the Herschel (abbreviated as H)
• the century (abbreviated as C)
• the dove (abbreviated as D)
• the pi-heptomino (abbreviated as P)
• the queen bee (abbreviated as Q)
• the wing (abbreviated as W)
• the I-heptomino (abbreviated as I)
• the two-glider octomino (abbreviated as O)
• the blonk-tie (abbreviated as J)
• the U-turner (abbreviated as U)
• the glider (abbreviated as G)
• the lightweight spaceship (abbreviated as L)
• the middleweight spaceship (abbreviated as M)

The letter X is used as a placeholder, such as in G-to-X.

There are also some objects that have some conduits which input or output it but are not considered to be "official" conduit signals, like the R-turner, the heavyweight spaceship, or "e9jp".

The names of conduits that input and/or output an object other than a Herschel are derived from 3 things: the input and output object, the orientation of the output object relative to the input, and the amount of time it takes for the output to reach its canonical form. More specifically, the name is structured as follows:

[abbreviation of the input object] [orientation of output object relative to the input object] [amount of time it takes for the output object to appear] [abbreviation of the output object]

For conduits with symmetrical inputs (i.e. a pi-heptomino or queen bee) like PF35W, an asterisk (*) is used to denote that the conduit can be flipped to place the input either clockwise or counterclockwise. The resulting pair of conduits will have outputs in the same number of ticks, but they will be either F and Fx (F*), L and Rx (L*), R and Lx (R*), or B and Bx (B*).

For conduits with both symmetrical inputs and outputs like PT8P, the resulting pair of conduits will have outputs in the same number of ticks, but they will be either F and Fx (F*), L, Rx, R and Lx (T), or B and Bx (B*).

So for example, take this conduit:

x = 15, y = 27, rule = B3/S23 o9b2o$3o4b2o2bo$3bo2bo2b2o$2b2o3b2o2b3o$9bobo2bo$9bo3b2o$10bo$9b2o5$3b 3o$5bo$3b3o9$2b2o$3bo$3o$o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 ZOOM 8 GPS 15 ]]

(click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here

It takes a Pi-heptomino (P) and in 35 generations it changes it into a Wing (W) facing forward (F) relative to the input, which makes this conduit PF35W.

Creating a useful conduit

To make it more likely that a new elementary conduit will be useful, the following should be true:

• The output should have enough clearance that it doesn't hit a catalyst before it can be perturbed.
• The input should have enough clearance that an object can get there. Some active objects, like B-heptominoes, usually come from certain directions, so make sure that direction isn't blocked.
• The input reaction is common enough. For example, there are a lot more U-turner input conduits than output conduits, but as more U-turner output conduits get found, the input conduits become more useful.
• The input and output reactions expand enough. Honey farms don't expand much and don't have that much use in conduits (with some known exceptions, like composite honeyfarm-involving H-to-Gs or a potentially useful honeyfarm eater that works in all eight orientations). Similarly, lumps of muck may appear useful, but they expand symmetrically from the origin rather than moving in one direction and aren't used in conduits much.

Finding a conduit that outputs a given methuselah is generally harder than finding a conduit accepting a given input. There is no known efficient way to search for a specific output reaction, other than searching for any output and filtering by the output later.

For general help with finding new conduits, see Tutorials/Finding conduits.

See also

• Conduits (category)

External links

• Conduit at the Life Lexicon
• Buckingham on B-heptominos in oscillators at Paul Callahan's Page of Conway's Life Miscellany
• Buckingham discussing stable reflectors and Herschel tracks at Paul Callahan's Page of Conway's Life Miscellany
• Stephen Silver on stable reflectors at Paul Callahan's Page of Conway's Life Miscellany
• Adam P. Goucher. Conway's game of Life - Stable technology (archived 2011 page)

Forum threads

Working conduits

• The Hunting of the Elementary Conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (stable elementary conduits)
• H-to-G and H-to-Gn converter collection (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (stable Herschel-to-glider converters)
• The Hunting of the New Herschel Conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (stable Herschel conduits, excluding Herschel-to-glider converters)
• Thread for your periodic conduits that do not necessarily involve Herschels (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (periodic elementary conduits)
• The Hunting of the Periodic Herschel Conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (periodic Herschel conduits)

Incomplete conduits

• Thread for your speculative elementary conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (using known signals / common active reactions)
• Thread for your conduits with active objects uncommonly used in conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
  (using uncommon signals)
• Keeping track of dirty conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums

Reactions and signals

• Thread for your reactions that might be useful for conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
• Thread for your chaos-edgeshooting reactions that can probably yield new conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
• Soup-searching for potentially conduit-yielding reactions (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
• Finding bottlenecks (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums