Caterpillar

Caterpillar
View static image
Pattern type	Spaceship
Number of cells	11880063
Bounding box	4195 × 330721
Direction	Orthogonal
Period	270
Mod	270
Speed	17c/45 | 102c/270
Heat	12114897.5
Discovered by	Gabriel Nivasch David Bell Jason Summers
Year of discovery	2004
Rules Outer-totalistic rules B3/S23 only # of rules 20 = 1
Pattern files Macrocell caterpillar.mc Zip archive caterpillar.zip
Identifiers Eppstein ID 1

The Caterpillar is the first 17c/45 spaceship that was constructed, and is the first crawler-based engineered spaceship, making use of the 17c/45 reaction. 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. It has 11,880,063 cells; this, however, can be reduced to 11,880,039 cells through trivial modification.

Caterpillar was, in terms of its minimum 11,880,063 alive cells, one of the largest patterns constructed in Life up to that point. 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. Despite this, it moves at the speed of 17c/45, which is the fourth fastest orthogonal speed with a known spaceship.

Gallery

• Caterpillar full.jpeg

  The whole spaceship (512 cells/pixel)

• 

  Full view of caterpillar (click to view)

Videos

Click to load content Various zoom levels of caterpillar demonstrating its size

See also

• Centipede

External links

• Caterpillar at the Life Lexicon
• "The 17c/45 Caterpillar spaceship". Gabriel Nivasch's Life page (January 2005). A "brief overview" of how the 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 the Caterpillar is with a few pictures, plus the pattern in RLE and .mc (macrocell) formats. Golly loads the macrocell file much more quickly than the RLE.

• The Caterpillar (glider 1) at David Eppstein's Glider Database