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Here's a one-bit perturbation of the original breeder pattern (which is in the Golly repository): x = 749, y = 338, rule = B3/S23 404bo2b2o$408bo$404bo3bo$405b4o$416b2o$402bo11bo4bo$400bobo17bo$342bob o46bo8bobo11bo5bo$342bobo44bo3bo21b6o5b6o$331bo10bob2o48bo30bo5bo$329b o3bo10b2o43bo4bo36bo$334bo6b...

How would one go about turning this into a true replicator? One would engage in a handwaving exercise , describing structures and mechanisms that are practically impossible to build as any kind of working models. And by "practically impossible", I really do mean "impossible in practice". Calculatin...

Congratulations on 329 glider universal constructor! Now let's see if we can do it in under 20 gliders. I don't think this is as ridiculous as it sounds. Look at how low the population for a quadratic growth pattern got, compared to the population of the first breeder. It seems likely to me that som...

Here's a version of Extremeenthusiast's one-way transporter with a bigger cavity: x = 677, y = 731, rule = B3/S23 38bo$36b3o$35bo$35b2o$49bo$47b3o$46bo$46b2o$52b2o$52bo$50bobo$50b2o5$ 21b2o$20bobo$20bo$19b2o11b3o$31bo2bo$31b2o2bo$34b2o5$25b2o$24bobo$24bo $23b2o9$43bo$41bobo$42b2o15$48b2o$48b2o2$19bo...

I invented some terminology that generalizes a whole bunch of concepts like "spaceship" and "wick" in this thread.

Inspired by this thread , I was thinking about how to classify all patterns that after enough time become entirely predictable. This most clearly includes oscillators and spaceships, but also includes more complicated patterns such as puffers, and wickstretchers and even breeders. I came up with a s...

I was playing around with Bill Gosper's original breeder pattern, and I found this pattern, which is identical to it except for a single cell: x = 749, y = 338, rule = B3/S23 404bo2b2o$408bo$404bo3bo$405b4o$416b2o$402bo11bo4bo$400bobo17bo$342bob o46bo8bobo11bo5bo$342bobo44bo3bo21b6o5b6o$331bo10bob2o...

Along the same lines as the puffer example, but more outrageous:

- A spaceship is an wickstretcher for the completely blank wick.

Now I did some more experiments with using scripting. In these experiments, long diagonal random strip is created and run until it reaches a stable state, and then many gliders are periodically created at a single spot. Here are the results: * First of all, there is a large degree of random variatio...

I did some experiements. First, I created a large soup and shot created many gliders from one point. I would wait an even number of steps between gliders, and would only create one when the dust from the last settled down. This is to simulate a gun with a large even period. The chaos caught up with ...

I'm not worried about crystals. I'm assuming a relatively high-density soup. The crystals I've seen are thicker the glider paths that construct them, so they would eventually be disrupted by still-lifes in the soup. Then again, just like how gliders might be able destroy all the debris in its path, ...

I was playing aound in Golly. I simulated a breeder for a while and then perturbed it. A chain of chaos destroyed most of the glider guns created. One of the glider guns survived, but it had a lot of broth in in its path. However, the gliders cleared a path and eventually went out to the open, with ...