2018 slow year?

[Tom Mazanec]

With the year over a third finished, we only have two patterns: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Category ... nd_in_2018
The Pattern of the Year competition normally has at least a dozen entries:
http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Pattern_of_the_Year
except for the Snark in 2013 (Sir Robin will probably be this in 2018).
Are we hitting a dry spell?

[dani]

The wiki has 7 patterns listed for 2017, and 2018 is only halfway done. The pattern of the year competitions usually take patterns from across the wiki.

It is by no means a slow year, in my opinion, and discoveries were more frequent in the past because there was less already discovered.

[dvgrn]

The wiki has 7 patterns listed for 2017, and 2018 is only halfway done. The pattern of the year competitions usually take patterns from across the wiki.

And the forums. It's best not to assume that the LifeWiki is anywhere near up-to-date -- it may take years for a new discovery to show up there. Or more likely these days, it will only show up after it gains notability due to being nominated for a Pattern of the Year competition.

For example, I wouldn't expect Goldtiger997's glider-to-loafer edge shooter to get its own LifeWiki entry, necessarily, but I'm thinking it ought to be nominated for the competition. It may not be in Sir Robin's league, quite, but not every pattern has to be a first-place contender.

[77topaz]

AbhpzTa's Sierpinski triangle generator is quite nice, too.

[Majestas32]

Simsims Turing machine thing too and maybe calcymans reverse caber tosser when it's done

[KittyTac]

I wonder what will we do once we run out of notable things to discover.

[Sokwe]

It's often hard to keep track of new patterns, and sometimes you can forget what's been discovered even a few months ago. For example, I forgot to nominate Scorbie's great honey farm oscillators the year they were eligable.

There are already many great patterns this year. Here are a few from my personal areas of interest that I intend to nominate for pattern of the year:

• Cottonmouth, a new c/10 orthogonal spaceship (actually a pushalong for the copperhead)
• The first non-monotonic 2c/5 ship
• Major reductions to the true-period p54, p55, and p56 guns based on a new 2G-to-Herschel converter
• A period-3 bumper that is the first reflector to work at p39

[dvgrn]

I wonder what will we do once we run out of notable things to discover.

Why would we run out? Search power, and cleverness of search algorithms, is still gradually increasing, so new searchable spaces will probably keep coming within reach for a good while yet.

And then people can always use existing notable stuff to build more complicated things that weren't practical before, like the Quest-for-Tetris Hashlife-friendly metacell, calcyman's 0E0P metacell, or a simpler quadratic-growth replicator or self-constructing spaceship -- any of those could perfectly well happen this year.