Today's featured article
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The lightweight spaceship (or LWSS for short) is the smallest orthogonally moving spaceship, and the second most common spaceship (after the glider). It moves orthogonally at c/2 and has period 4. It was found by John Conway in 1970.
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In the news
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- June 1-2: Goldtiger997 completes the critical final-stage synthesis of a lobster spaceship via an almost completely diagonally symmetric collision between 39 gliders and a 175-bit still life constellation; a collaborative effort produces a 186-glider construction recipe the same day, reduced to 118 gliders over the next two days.
- May 17: lumi builds a maximally Golly-friendly self-synchronized linear replicator, speed 256c/1048576, bounding box 65676 × 65520, minimum population 16702; each new child copy is precisely in sync with the parent.
- May 15: Mitchell Riley discovers a new record smallest p116 oscillator that hassles the object seen in Karel's p177.
- May 14: hibiscus posts a 208-glider synthesis of the smallest known solifuge spaceship variant, minimum population 1414.
- May 11-12: Dmitry Maitak reduces the Orion 2 synthesis from 54 gliders to 31 gliders. Based on this, vilc completes the first synthesis of Orion in 67 gliders, which is subsequently reduced by vilc and KtT to 55 gliders.
- May 8: lumi completes another large reduction in linear propagator design, from February's 83K-cell design down to only 12372 cells, building on recent universal-constructor optimization work by russellsprouts and inductivetype.
- May 8: vilc uses 98 gliders to synthesize 36P3H1V0.2, which had been one of the four smallest spaceships with no known glider synthesis.
- May 7: Entity Valkyrie 2 completes a new series of 90-degree periodic reflectors using an octomino II-to-glider converter found by Anivec and pointed out by Timelord Missionary.
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Did you know...
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- ... that the smallest known spacefiller pattern consists of 107 cells?
- ... that the smallest known sawtooth pattern in Conway's Life consists of only 168 cells?
- ... that there are now over two hundred known Herschel conduits, counting stable conduits only, and a much larger number if oscillator-supported conduits are included?
- ... that the period-21 glider gun discovered in 2021 was the seventh smallest gun in bounding box when found?
- ... that a pattern exists in which no cell in the unbounded Life plane ever becomes periodic?
- ... that several different universal constructors in Conway’s Life have been shown to be capable of constructing their own circuitry?
- ... that there are dozens of known Cordership variants, including puffers, rakes and wickstretchers, with periods of any multiple of 96?
- ... that greyships have been constructed with speeds of c/2, c/3, c/4, c/5, and 2c/5?
- ... that most greyships travel parallel to the stripes in their included agars, but a few travel perpendicular to the stripes, or "against the grain"?
- ... that a pattern has been constructed that calculates and prints out the digits of pi in decimal, and a similar one prints out the decimal digits of the Golden Ratio?
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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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