Today's featured article
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| A switch engine is a methuselah that was found by Charles Corderman in 1971. It is unstable by itself, but it can be used to make c/12 diagonal puffers and spaceships.
There are two basic types of stabilized switch engine, both of which were also found by Charles Corderman: the period 288 block-laying switch engine (the more common of the two) and period 384 glider-producing switch engine. These two puffers are the most natural infinite growth patterns in Life, being by far the most common ones to occur from non-symmetric random starting patterns.
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In the news
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- January 8: Frank Everdij discovers tarantula, a new c/5 orthogonal spaceship which, in terms of its minimum population of 58 cells, is tied with spider as the smallest known c/5 orthogonal spaceship.
- December 31: blah posts a complete package containing a 32-bit computer implemented in Conway's Life -- the "323" -- along with an assembler script, example programs, extensive HTML documentation and an MP4 introductory video. (!)
- December 30-31: Goldtiger997 constructs an activation step for a synthesis of the c/5 orthogonal spaceship Kermit. vilc completes a 343-glider synthesis through a collaborative effort with several other users.
- December 27: Gustone completes the leaf bug, a record-breaking new self-supporting 31c/240 spaceship with a smaller population (though larger bounding box) than the previous record-holding self-supporting spaceship (the waterbear).
- December 23: Rei posts an APGsembly program that calculates and displays in the Life universe a plot of the Mandelbrot set.
- December 18-23: Tim Coe reduces the size of the smallest sawtooth-based diehard from 53×53 to 49×49, reduced again several days later to 47×47 by b3s23love; the resulting diehard's lifespan is much smaller than the 53×53 diehard's lifespan of 1826659985823844806 ticks -- i.e., the new lifespan of 1237975907532 ticks is only a record for the new reduced bounding box size.
- December 18: confocaloid constructs a racetrack oscillator showcasing a diagonal 5c/26 biblock wire; the wire is supported by an extensible p4 sparker found by Keith Amling in July.
- December 14: A significantly improved compiler and emulator package for APGsembly version 2 is posted by new contributor branoc, with new optimized arithmetic components, sample code and documentation.
- December 11: Matthias Merzenich completes a very high-clearance period-7 middleweight sparker based on a partial result by hotcrystal0.
- December 5: Matthias Merzenich completes the first true period-35 glider gun based on a partial result by iNoMed and hotcrystal0.
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Did you know...
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- ... that the LWSS, MWSS and HWSS are the only known polyomino spaceships for more than 50 years?
- ..that Burloaferimeter is the only known oscillator with a heat lower than 2?
- ...that despite the Pi-heptomino being known for over 50 years and its notable forward motion, it has not been stabilised to a 3c/10 spaceship yet?
- ...that the only known orthogonal spaceships in non-strobing outer-totalistic rules with speed c/2 < v < c have v = 2c/3, though in strobing rules there are also known spaceships of speed 3c/4 and 5c/8?
- ...that the existence of spaceships in outer-totalistic rules with B23 and S0 and without B01 has been disproven, but of the 8192 such rules without S0, there are spaceships (all of which are p2 photons) known in only 8?
- ...that the cyclic has been rediscovered no less than 13 times?
- ... that Dominoplex and B2ein3cijn4cnrwy5cnq6e/S1c2-ai3acny4anqy5c6ek8 are the first two-state alien isotropic non-totalistic rules with explicitly constructed orthogonoids?
- …that any negative spaceship in a greyship would have to move against the grain, since with the grain ones can only travel at the speed of light, but both greyships and negative spaceships that travel against the grain are more difficult to find, and no c/2 or slower negative spaceship is known?
- ...that there are 4 oscillators that are the smallest asymmetric oscillators, namely Fox, Caterer, and the two isomers of beacon on table, namely Cis-beacon on table and Trans-beacon on table?
- ...that John Conway once mentioned that he regretted naming the glider as such, saying it looks more like an ant walking across the plane?
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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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