Purpose of spaceships and how to build them?

[idonteven]

I've been wondering these two things since i first learned about Conway's Game of Life:
1. How do you build spaceships? Take for example, the caterpillar, how do you build things like that?!?
2. What's even the purpose of spaceships that big?
This may sound stupid, but I really want to know!

[muzik]

1. How do you build spaceships? Take for example, the caterpillar, how do you build things like that?!?

First you need to find a specific type of reaction, in the case of the caterpillar this was a crawler. It reacted with blinkers in front of it, and created identically spaced blinkers behind it. The reaction could then react with neighbouring copies of itself to throw out gliders to the sides, and eventually create more blinkers for the crawlers to feed on, since if the blinkers ended there would be no more support for the crawler. Of course you also need to clean up the last bunkers at the very end.

Hope you could follow that.

2. What's even the purpose of spaceships that big?

Gotta catch em all.

[dvgrn]

2. What's even the purpose of spaceships that big?

Gotta catch em all.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, putting together a big self-supporting moving pattern is kind of like doing a crossword puzzle. Except it's a crossword puzzle that nobody knows the answer to until someone finishes it for the first time -- and it's more fun to look at when it's complete, too.

[idonteven]

2. What's even the purpose of spaceships that big?

Gotta catch em all.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, putting together a big self-supporting moving pattern is kind of like doing a crossword puzzle. Except it's a crossword puzzle that nobody knows the answer to until someone finishes it for the first time -- and it's more fun to look at when it's complete, too.

That crossword puzzle also moves too. :)

[biggiemac]

The engineered spaceships are made from building blocks that match together with phase offsets to produce some controlled over-unity reaction. The rest of the work is harnessing the over-unity output to keep the front end moving along.

I like simple questions with extremely involved answers, (much of which is why I went into physics).. So seeing the discussion about the (23,5)c/79 components led me to join the forums to try to answer the question "what might a complete (23,5)c/79 spaceship in game of life look like?" The involved answer meant assembling it. The result was quite satisfying.