Broken lines
| Broken lines | |||||
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| View static image | |||||
| Pattern type | Miscellaneous | ||||
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| Discovered by | Dean Hickerson | ||||
| Year of discovery | 2005 | ||||
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This pattern produces a broken line of gliders heading southwest, produced by the collision of two lines of LWSSs (which also produce a broken line going northeast). The two input lines have themselves been broken by lines of gliders, one directly produced by a rake, the other produced by the collision of the northeast line of gliders colliding with the rake's line. This collision also intermittently produces additional gliders, which wander off to the southwest, eventually impacting one of the lines of LWSSs.
The open question is whether the pattern eventually breaks, as the additional gliders may crash into the stationary gun, destroying it. Dean did not observe this in 535,000 generations, but he suspects the failures may be "exponentially sparse" so it might be billions of generations before one is observed.
The pattern has now been tested to over 474 million generations, without a failure observed.
Broken lines can be seen at http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/. Once you click on the link, look for something saying "Patterns too big for the applet" without the quotas, and scroll down until you see it.