Difference between revisions of "Caterpillar"

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==See also==
==See also==
*[[17c/45 reaction]]
*[[17c/45 reaction]]
*[[:Category:Spaceships with speed 31c/240|List of 31c/240 spaceships]]


==External links==
==External links==

Revision as of 06:57, 9 September 2014

Caterpillar
Caterpillar image
Pattern type Spaceship
Number of cells 11880063
Bounding box 4195 × 330721
Direction Orthogonal
Period 270
Mod Unknown
Speed 17c/45 | Unknown
Heat Unknown
Discovered by Gabriel Nivasch
Year of discovery 2004

The caterpillar is the first 17c/45 spaceship that was constructed. It was created via a combination of manually-constructed parts put together by David Bell, Jason Summers and Gabriel Nivasch and a computer-aided construction coded by Nivasch. The caterpillar's construction took place over a long period of time, but it was completed on December 31, 2004.

Caterpillar is, in terms of its 11,880,063 alive cells, by far the largest interesting pattern that has been constructed in Life. By comparison, the Spartan universal computer-constructor has a larger bounding box, but only half a million live cells. The image to the right is zoomed out to a scale of 32 cells per pixel and still only shows the top 3% of it. Encoded as an RLE file, it is over 29MB in size.

Videos

Various zoom levels of caterpillar demonstrating its size

See also

External links

  • "The 17c/45 Caterpillar spaceship". Gabriel Nivasch's Life page (January 2005). A "brief overview" of how caterpillar works (with illustrations and RLE files of parts), the pattern in RLE format, plus complete C++ & RLE sources for assembling it.
  • "17c/45 "Caterpillar" spaceship". Jason Summer's Life page. A short summary of what caterpillar is with a few pictures, plus the pattern in RLE and MCell formats. (Golly loads the MCell file much more quickly than the RLE.)