Elementary conduit
An elementary conduit is a conduit with no recognizable active object stage besides its input and output. An early example still very commonly used is David Buckingham's BFx59H, which transforms a B-heptomino into an inverted Herschel in 59 ticks. The BFx59H elementary conduit is a component in many of the original universal toolkit of Herschel conduits. (An extension of the same naming convention is used for elementary conduits, with the first and last letters of the name specifying the input and output objects. As with Herschels, an arbitrary orientation and center point is chosen for each object. "Fx" means the active object moves forward and produces a mirror-image output; see Herschel conduit for further details.)
Tracks made out of elementary conduits can be used to transfer signals through the Life universe, making elementary conduits useful in engineered signal-processing patterns.
Theoretically an elementary conduit may become a composite conduit, if another conduit can be found that shares the beginning or end of the conduit in question. In practice this happens only rarely, because many of the most likely branch points have already been identified: glider (G), LWSS (L) or MWSS (M) or HWSS (HWSS), Herschel (H), B-heptomino (B), R-pentomino (R), pi-heptomino (P), queen bee shuttle (Q), century or bookend (C), dove (D), two-glider octomino (O), U-turner (U), Blonk-tie (J), I-heptomino (I), and wing (W). A Herschel descendant (H') might qualify, due to the elementary conduit that can be seen in the p184 gun. However, there are very few simple conduits that produce Herschel descendants without Herschels, so in practice this is not a useful branch point.
External links
- Elementary conduit at the Life Lexicon
- The Hunting of the Elementary Conduits (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums -- the Elementary Conduits Collection and standard orientations of input/output objects