User:PK22

PK22 is a Life enthusiast.

About me

I am interested in cellular automata, mainly CGOL. I have discovered/reduced some syntheses, mainly those of still lifes. I enjoy contributing to Catagolue. I can write programs in Python, but have yet to write any significant search programs.

How I discovered CGoL

In late 2023, I was working on random short Python projects to improve my programming ability, and Conway's Game of Life happened to be one of these. Normally I would move on from a project once done, but it prompted me to do more research into CGoL, and I discovered LifeWiki fairly soon after that. I joined the forums roughly a year later.

Discoveries

• March 16-17: I found syntheses for three lakes with no known synthesis. These were my first posts on the forums.

• March 22: I reduced the synthesis of the regenerative loop to 18G, down from 29G. It has since been reduced to 14G.

• April 12: I constructed a 16SL 1G seed for a Coe ship, based on a 5SL dirty seed by TigerCub414. On April 17, I reduced this to 12SL.

• April 29: I constructed a dimer of BTS in 22G. At the time, this was only slightly significant, but the catalyst was later used by Chris857 to create a synthesis for a stator variant of Honey ring on August 5.
• May 3: I found a synthesis for a commonly used stator variant of 31.4 in 53G.

• May 13: After it occurred in one of my G1 hauls, I created a 13SL 1G seed for tempest.

• July 12: I found a synthesis for a stator variant of Jason's p11 in 36G.

• August 15: Using a reaction from Pseudo_D4_+1_Test, I proved that even without RCT technology, any 2xN block array is constructible in ≤ 2N+3 gliders. On August 26, I found a more efficient method, meaning all but four arrays are constructible in less than one glider per block.

• August 29: I found a 26G synthesis for a stator variant of Airforce, 10G cheaper than the canonical version.

• September 21: I found a 34G synthesis for a stator variant of Pyrotechnecium, which was used by KtT to create a 40G synthesis for the canonical form.

• September 23: I constructed the first example of a gliderless gun to fire a non-standard spaceship - see the section below on gliderless guns.

• October 18: I finished work on the first Thessalonic Demonoid, a macro-spaceship where all permanent circuitry is Thessalonic. See the section below on Thessalonic spaceships.

• November 23: I constructed the Thessalonic Demonoid 2, which is even more Thessalonic than its predecessor.

Gliderless guns

I was the first person to construct gliderless guns that fire non-standard spaceships:

• LWSS on HWSS 3 - Created on September 23, 2025. The first gliderless gun to fire a non-standard spaceship.

• Coe ship - Created on September 25, 2025. The first gliderless gun to not fire a standard spaceship or flotilla thereof. Based on a reaction originally found by TigerCub414.

• MWSS on MWSS 1 - Created on September 27, 2025. Based on a reaction found by Kazyan, with cleanup improved by ThePlayzr.

• Loafer - Created on September 29, 2025. The first gliderless gun to fire a spaceship slower than c/2. Based on a soup found by Charity Engine, with the reaction simplified by Dave Greene and with cleanup improved by EvinZL.

• 2-engine Cordership - Created on October 3, 2025, based on a 3 MWSS synthesis of a switch engine. The first gliderless gun to fire a diagonal spaceship, and the first gliderless gun to fire an engineered spaceship.

Thessalonic spaceships

I have constructed several Thessalonic macro-spaceships, which, despite being made up of only eater 1s and blocks, are still capable of constructing a copy of their own circuitry using modern single-channel methods.

• September 12: I came up with and posted about the concept of a Thessalonic spaceship, believing it to be possible with current technology.

• October 11: I realised that NW31 could be used to support single-channel glider streams with minimum RT 90, despite the Spartan G-to-W-to-H having RT 112, by merging two glider streams.

• October 17: I published a Thessalonic puffer with speed (511,511)c/16777216.

• October 18: I completed the first Thessalonic Demonoid. The construction arm builds a copy of a single edgeshooter-reflector unit, then destroys a unit that is no longer in use. However, it uses temporary Snarks, which means it is technically not fully Thessalonic. This prompted me to design the Thessalonic Demonoid 2.

• November 23: I completed the Thessalonic Demonoid 2, which only contains Thessalonic circuitry, irrespective of its role. The lack of Snarks meant I had to find workarounds, so I programmed the elbow to construct one reflector in a unit using a 0-degree elbow, and developed basic 'countdown circuitry', which allows the units to keep track of when they should be destroyed using an unary countdown system. The resulting spaceship was about half as fast, at (255,255)c/16777216, and much slower to run in HashLife, but it was more Thessalonic than its predecessor.

Also, the working design was built in a single day, based on blueprints I made only two days prior.

Programs

I have written two minor search programs:

• apgsearch Py3 - An adaptation of apgsearch v1.x to Python 3, hence the name. It also has additional features, such as 'pseudo-object symmetries', which do not separate pseudo still lifes and oscillators, and inflated symmetries. It is avaliable either from the wiki, or on GitHub. Note that it may run into issues on Linux.

• astrocrash - A program to census collisions of spaceships, which can be applied to any isotropic range-1 Moore rule. It comes with a program to generate collisions, written by Cyclotrons in 2021, and a program to search through the output files and find collisions that produce a desired constellation. A beta version was used in the creation of the first non-standard gliderless guns. It is avaliable on GitHub.

Catagolue

My user page: PK22

I uploaded my first hauls in January 2025, initially using apgsearch v1.x and later with the precompiled version 5.x.

Currently, I have three badges: Trillionaire, Sprotsmanship, and Limitless.

My most significant discoveries are new 35, 36-cell and 37-cell still lifes, the eighth natural occurrence of tempest., and a new natural infinite growth pattern.

OCA

I am interested in OCA, but not as much compared to CGoL. See User:PK22/B36n7eS2-i3 for information about a rule I discovered.

I am also involved in the exploration of B3/S23-a5 - see User:PK22/OCA:Travelling Ts.