This week's featured article
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A sawtooth is a finite pattern whose population grows without bound but does not tend to infinity. In other words, it is a pattern with population that reaches new heights infinitely often, but also infinitely often drops below some fixed value. Their name comes from the fact that their plot of population versus generation number looks roughly like an ever-increasing sawtooth graph.
The first sawtooth was constructed by Dean Hickerson in April 1991 by using a loaf tractor beam (a technique that was also used in the construction of sawtooth 633). The least infinitely repeating population of any known sawtooth is 177, attained by Sawtooth 177; the smallest bounding box of any known sawtooth is 62 × 56, attained by a variant of the same pattern, Sawtooth 195.
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In the news
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Did you know...
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- ... that 24 ten-cell patterns exhibit infinite growth, with 17 unique pattern types, but that it has been proven that no nine-cell pattern exhibits infinite growth?
- ... that all still lifes up to 21 bits have a known glider synthesis, but that there is a 236-cell still life that cannot be synthesised, so there is a population threshold between these at which not all still lifes can be constructed?
- ... that the French kiss remained without a glider synthesis until 2013, and there are still fourteen 17-bit p2s that have not been successfully synthesized?
- ... that Adam P. Goucher's distributed Catagolue soup-search project, started in February 2015, has tested several orders of magnitude more random soups than any previous such project, and has contributed to the reduction of many glider construction recipes?
- ... that with the appearance of the 0E0P metacell, the number of periods for which strict volatility 1 oscillators were known went from 12 to infinity?
- ... that Copperhead is not only the first c/10 orthogonal spaceship ever found, but also remarkably compact for a pattern not discovered until 2016?
- ... that loafer is the fifth smallest non-flotilla spaceship, but was discovered 43 years after the four spaceships smaller than it?
- ... that despite being the fourth smallest non-flotilla orthogonal spaceship, loafer did not appear from a single randomly generated soup until 2020?
- ... that all known glider eaters take at least four ticks to recover to their original state after eating a glider?
- ... that among Life-like (outer-totalistic) rules, Conway's Life's "near neighbours" B35/S23, B36/S23, and B38/S23 are not explosive, but B37/S23 is?
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Pattern collection
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| The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find:
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