Eater 1

Eater 1
x = 4, y = 4, rule = B3/S23 2o$obo$2bo$2b2o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ THUMBSIZE 3 ZOOM 21 HEIGHT 400 SUPPRESS ]]
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Pattern type	Eater
Number of cells	7
Bounding box	4 × 4
Discovered by	Bill Gosper
Year of discovery	1971
Rules Outer-totalistic rules B/S23 – B3678/S012345678 # of rules 211 = 2048
Glider synthesis Fewest gliders 2 Uploaded synthesis RLE eater1_synth.rle
Pattern files Plaintext eater1.cells RLE eater1.rle

Eater 1 (or fishhook or simply eater) was the first discovered eater. Its ability to eat various objects was discovered by Bill Gosper in 1971. It is the smallest still life that is neither radially symmetric nor symmetric through a line, and it is the thirteenth most common still life, being less common than mango but more common than long barge.

It only takes four generations to recover from being hit by a glider, making it the fastest-recovering glider eater, and it is also the smallest glider eater. As such, it appears as a stabilizer at the corner of dozens of oscillators including 36P22, buckaroo, P54 shuttle, pentoad, pre-pulsar shuttle 47, and snacker.

Eating reactions

Eater 1 is extremely useful as an eater because in addition to being able to eat gliders, it can also eat blinkers, lightweight spaceships, loaves, middleweight spaceships, pre-beehives, R-bees and many other patterns, as shown below. Its tail can be used as a rock that eats an unnamed 7-cell polyplet. Its pre-beehive eating reaction is used in the period 12 oscillator dinner table.

Some eater 1s about to eat several different objects Download RLE: click here

See also

• Eater 2
• Eater 3
• Eater 4
• Eater 5
• List of common still lifes

External links

• Eater 1 at the Life Lexicon

• Seven-bit still lifes by Mark Niemiec