Waterbear

Waterbear
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Pattern type	Spaceship
Number of cells	197896
Bounding box	13295 × 28010
Direction	Oblique
Slope	23/5
Period	158
Mod	158
Speed	(23,5)c/79 | Unknown
Heat	160959.2
Discovered by	Brett Berger Ivan Fomichev
Year of discovery	2014
Rules Outer-totalistic rules B3/S23 only # of rules 20 = 1
Pattern files Zip archive waterbear.zip

Waterbear is an oblique spaceship constructed by Brett Berger on December 28, 2014. It was the smallest (in terms of bounding box) known oblique spaceship, superseding parallel HBK, until the discovery of Sir Robin in March 2018. It was also the first "fast" oblique spaceship discovered in Conway's Game of Life.

The helix, fanout devices and syntheses for the helix were found by Ivan Fomichev.

Design

The base reaction consists of a crawler consisting of a Herschel running on a track of gliders. The Herschel consumes a southwest glider and emits two gliders, one southwest and the other southeast, every 79 generations. Interactions between neighboring tracks are used to create the necessary components to recreate the helix.

In July 2013, Ivan Fomichev proposed a very rough blueprint for the spaceship giving the shape below.

The first outline of the shape a (23,5)c/79 spaceship would take.

Being made from gliders, the track gradually moves away from the helix, giving rise to the triangular bodies. To prevent the ship from growing exponentially in size, the same procedure used to build the helix is used to "reset" the track. In the Waterbear design, this reset occurs at two points, resulting in three smaller triangles instead of one much larger one. The reset comes at the cost of a fair amount of output-suppressing cleanup, so the design balances the exponential growth and the constant cleanup cost to achieve a reasonably small final area.

Video

Click to load content A demonstration of the spaceship in motion

See also

• Caterpillar
• Gemini
• Parallel HBK