Factory
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A factory is either a non-glider gun, a stationary still life/oscillator maker or[citation needed] a signal to still life/oscillator converter. The best-known and most common factory is the queen bee, which manufactures beehives. Factories are commonly used as memory cells (Like Demultiplexer) or stabilised to oscillators (Like Achim's p144). Some periodic factory mechanisms also stabilise themselves; an example is 51P384.
If the factory produces spaceships, it is much more commonly referred to as a gun. If it produces still lifes or oscillators, it will generally need other components to support it: the new object does not move out of the way, and therefore must be used up in some way before the next one is made. An exception is shown in the keeper entry, where a block factory using stable components is triggered by an input Herschel, and the reaction safely cleans up the existing block (if any) before creating a new one.
The following shows an example of a p144 gun, new gun 2, which consists of a p144 block factory whose output is converted into gliders by a p72 oscillator, Two blockers hassling R-pentomino. This gun is David Bell's improvement of the one Bill Gosper found in July 1994. The p72 oscillator is by Robert Wainwright in 1990, and the block factory is Achim's p144 minus one of its stabilizing blocks.
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External links
- Factory at the Life Lexicon