ConwayLife.com

The cheapest way to make a 2-glider salvo is with just 3 gliders using a kickback reaction. There is only the one problematic exception T=14 H=0. Just for the record, here's a sample 11-glider recipe for that pesky T=14 H=0, constructing either a leading or following glider (or both). It seems clea...

Is synthesis known for these two salvos? x = 16, y = 36, rule = B3/S23 $8bo$6b2o$7b2o4$5bo$4bo$4b3o14$2b2o$2bobo$2bo6$9b3o$9bo$10bo! I'm using this on a c/2 rake, so if there is a simple way to do this, that's be great. Technically this isn't so much "two salvos" as "two pairs of synchronized glide...

Example: 7-glider solution for maximally tight H=6 salvo: ... Can it be done with fewer gliders? I hope so. Hmm, how about three gliders? If it counts, it will mighty hard to improve this any further -- is it somehow cheating to use a quick slick kickback trick? #C kickback reaction produces two gl...

I am more interested in the two-glider salvo, as the three-glider salvo can be rather easily synthesized: ... I have not been able to find any other means of synthesizing the two-glider salvo, however. There's a three-cell offset between those gliders, so it's pretty easy to sneak the trailing glid...

> What exactly do you want to program the UCC to do? Just about anything! I'm going to have presentation at class about Universal Cellular Automata and I was thinking Calcyman's design is a good candidate for my work. Sounds good. The constructor-memory-tape pattern is a universal _constructor_ -- ...

the name was just 'life' I'd say. Could it have been Xlife? That was the standard Unix/Linux Life app until Golly came along, I think: see for example http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/xlife.6.html The latest stable version is on Achim Flammenkamp's website . Xlife is a classic "project that got...

H to 2G converter: Yup, that's H-to-G number 1 -- here's a link to the latest version of Stephen Silver's Herschel-to-glider converter collection . Can't believe it's going on three years already since the last update -- there must be some new technology I've forgotten to add. (?) #C H-to-G #1 -- H...

The left-hand MWSS glider-out-of-the-blue reaction that Calcyman posted is used here and there around the perimeter of the metapixel, to generate the eight ON signals going out to neighbor metacells. I described the other reaction wrong, the one that creates a perpendicular LWSS -- the flyby reactio...

..... Do you use basic knowledge about the game and build up? or are you using brute force computers with some complex algorithm? ..... A very large fraction of the more complicated patterns certainly had brute-force computer searches somewhere in their convoluted lineage. Just for example: the sta...

Hmm, okay. Thanks for the reply. Would it be possible to bind a keystroke command to a function to update the layers in the way I describe, then? That's the solution I was thinking of -- yes, it would be easy to set up a script like that. One way, not necessarily the best way but very simple, might...

I wrote: Here's an example [LWSS Heisenburp] I threw together this evening; it's not particularly optimized, just some standard p46 circuitry stolen from Brice Due's metapixel pattern . Now that I look again, PM 2Ring's LWSS fanout is basically the same Heisenburp glider suppression trick, done at p...

Has anyone made a Heisenburp duplicator for LWSS? I found a perfect reaction that kills a Herschel as an LWSS flys by totally untouched. Very nice. I seem to recall there are a number of glider paths that can kill off a Herschel without affecting the glider, as well, but I think they're maybe not q...

Golly 2.x has most of what's needed to set up a competitive game of this kind, I think: for example, you could use two or more tiled layers, so the competition could be run side-by-side on the same screen. Would have to make a few modifications to oscar.py or oscar.pl so it will detect the first gen...

Edit: Is this the first heisenburp in which the glider does not get destroyed and then recreated by the reaction, but rather just keeps on trucking without really even noticing? No, there's a fairly long history of "pure" Heisenburp reactions of this type -- see heisenburp-30.rle and heisenburp-46....

Nicolay Beluchenko wrote his "Oscichem" (oscillator chemistry) series of articles five years or so ago, proposing an interesting pile of new terminology based on analogies to chemical bonds and the like... I'll post a full set of links when I get this straightened out. Just for the record, here are...

You are right that there aren't enough gliders. A Herschel track does not make enough gliders to build itself. That is where this breaks down. Another source of gliders would be needed such as Herschel loops, guns or rakes launched to the side. Once you allow extra rakes and such off to the side, y...

Known stable Herschel technology is versatile enough to construct any pattern that can be produced by colliding gliders. What if the pattern can only be constructed by using tightly packed salvos that are not themselves constructible? Has it been proven that any glider salvo is constructible? I sup...

This works! This P6 oscillator came up pretty quickly, even manually. The trick seems to be to keep up the heat in the center. Hmm, not all of those gliders are doing anything useful, though: #C 16-glider synthesis of p6 oscillator, reduced from 24 gliders x = 102, y = 102, rule = B3/S23 bobo$2b2o9...

I still don't quite understand how people make stuff like glider-to-LWSS converters and patterns that do cool things with this. This question has a couple of possible interpretations: 1) How do people go about discovering new conduits -- i.e., conduits that make use of reactions that were not previ...

Can you search for even-symmetric random soups, in order to find weekender predecessors? Interesting idea... I spent some time thinking about this yesterday, but the more I thought about it the less I could see the point. You'd expect a weekender to appear along the axis of symmetry, I take it? Onl...

I wrote: Biblocks are easy to construct by colliding two gliders, but they're relatively difficult to produce with slow glider salvoes ... Before anyone else comes up with this objection, let me quickly admit that good old fishhook eaters are at *least* as difficult to construct with slow glider sal...

I have found that "Spartan" refers to the five still life patterns: block, beehive, eater, tub, and boat... Why is the tub part of the group and not one of the other easily constructible still life patterns like the pond? Well, there's a short answer and a long answer to this -- neither of which ma...

But P2 grammar connects different kinds of oscillators in a smooth "seamless" fashion. Nicolay Beluchenko wrote his "Oscichem" (oscillator chemistry) series of articles five years or so ago, proposing an interesting pile of new terminology based on analogies to chemical bonds and the like. Based on...

(Golly cant open ".lif" file extensions.) Depending on the version, Golly may be able to open it... Some .lif files are more complex, and define patterns in terms of sub-components, some of which may be defined in other files. The conversion program doesn't work properly on these. :( Once upon a ti...

...the image.aspx script takes the RLE data in from the querystring, and the querystring automatically strips out any linebreak characters. So, for example, it's absolutely impossible for it to distinguish between: x = 3, y = 32 bo$2bo$3o and x = 3, y = 3 2bo$2bo$3o It's a pretty contrived example,...