Caterpillar
| Caterpillar | |||||||||
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| Pattern type | Spaceship | ||||||||
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| Number of cells | 11880063 | ||||||||
| Bounding box | 4195×330721 | ||||||||
| Direction | Orthogonal | ||||||||
| Period | 270 | ||||||||
| Mod | 270 | ||||||||
| Speed | 17c/45 | ||||||||
| Speed (unsimplified) | 102c/270 | ||||||||
| Heat | 12114897.5 | ||||||||
| Discovered by | Gabriel Nivasch David Bell Jason Summers | ||||||||
| Year of discovery | 2004 | ||||||||
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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.[1]
Caterpillar is, in terms of its minimum 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. Despite this, it moves at the speed of 17c/45, which is the fourth fastest orthogonal speed with a known spaceship.
Gallery
The whole spaceship (512 cells/pixel)
Full view of caterpillar (click to view)
Videos
See also
References
- ↑ Dave Greene (28 June 2016). "Re: Caterpillar's little brother research". Retrieved on 2 July 2016.
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
- Patterns
- Patterns with 1000 or more cells
- Patterns found by Gabriel Nivasch
- Patterns found by David Bell
- Patterns found by Jason Summers
- Patterns found in 2004
- Spaceships
- Periodic objects with minimum population 11880063
- Spaceships with period 270
- Orthogonal spaceships
- Spaceships with speed 17c/45
- Spaceships with unsimplified speed 102c/270
- Spaceships with heat 12114897
- Spaceships with mod 270
- Non-monotonic spaceships
- Engineered spaceships
