ConwayLife.com

I've already written such a script at least for dedensifying a single gun, although it uses LifeLib rather than Golly. It shouldn't be hard to write a shell script to batch-run the list. Sounds good! For the record, I've looked at all of the remaining guns with period above 999 and density over 0.1...

Quick follow-up to the previous post: Among guns above 100x100, there's a very sudden and suspicious drop-off in density after guntrue_3359; guntrue_2213 is the first gun below a density of 0.1, and it's not overdensified, whereas guntrue_3359 is. I suspect the top of this list is going to be a big ...

EDIT: See also the next post on the next page. Uploaded a bunch of new fixes to some of the increasingly few overdensified Bounding Boxes. Is there a way to check which glider gun periods still need fixes? I had Copilot write a bounding-box density surveyor -- currently it's set up to scan just the...

Alas, it looks very inconvenient for a gun since several gliders come down the output trajectory, implying the gun would be very high-period at best. Well, that's only a problem if you insist that the gun has to use a synthesis with the same number of gliders as the minimum recipe. There are 34 gli...

Very slight additional optimisation for speed (72c/178568d) and minpop compared to the 72c/179000d design (Minpop 7058 versus 7060), achieved by reducing the time taken between the block push instructions (used to move the to-be-built construction arm) and the start of the single-channel Simkin gun...

Here's a Solifuge Heisenburp which can be attached to the bottom of a Solifuge... The repeat time is 1147. On an unrelated note, the minimum following distance for 2 Solifuges is 981 generations. I wouldn't want to try to build an X-to-Solifuge converter with 981-tick repeat time -- current recipes...

Why is it being referred to as a 'Simkin ECCA'? What do you suggest to use? It is faster in sending slow recipes then ECCA's we used, but it is missing the "bits" interface. The inventor of the mechanism has provisionally settled on a generalization of the term, oncoming glider gun construction arm...

Once we are done with W, SWW and SSW shell construction, we simply destroy the simkinecca and build another (on E corner which was allocated by synchronized lwss from W and glider from S) ... ok the glider could not be sent on required lane while simkinecca is still alive. I'm not quite clear on th...

LLS I am not quite sure about. Maybe someone more exprenced can answer this! LSS is an interface that enables a SAT solver to run searches for CGoL patterns (or CA patterns in general, doesn't have to be plain vanilla Life). There's a LifeWiki LLS tutorial that walks through a variety of tasks that...

The fates of all 5x5 patterns in an infinite universe have been worked out quite a few times now, as far back as 1997. Here are some relevant forum discussions: Re: Golly Scripts Small Tori in B3/S23 I'm not quite sure where to put information like this on the LifeWiki. Maybe there should be somethi...

First, it's probably good to add (and keep updating) a set of keys listing already-known results, so that the script doesn't re-report them when it's re-run again with a wider range that includes earlier search results. Second, it turns out that the leading pre-LOMs in these conglomerates can somet...

Does anyone know of an efficient algorithm using HashLife to find all of the cells of on object which lie on just one side of an oblique line connecting two points? Currently, I have to do this by scanning the cells of the object one by one and checking each point against the line. This obviously d...

I haven't tried any wider searches yet. Eventually maybe I'll generalize this script to allow for searches with more than four pre-LOMs, but if anyone is interested please go ahead -- you'll probably get around to it before I do. I tried a slightly wider search -- +/-2 in each dimension instead of ...

ChatGPT and I just spent an hour or so putting together an experimental search program for finding new Solifuge congLOMerates. With the default inputs it finds three conglomerates, which I don't think are anything new -- two cleanups for a block trail, and the puffer conglomerate that creates a beeh...

Here's a partial stable Solifuge eater (technically a Solifuge-to-LWSS)... I've been trying to reduce the mess created by the back part without any luck. A working eater/converter is definitely within reach though. Have you considered inventing a Solifuge Heisenburp first, to give your eater circui...

What stable LWSS dupes & reflectors are there? There aren't any elementary LWSS reflectors. Direct X-to-LWSS converters are rare enough that we only have a few of them, with varying degrees of awkwardness -- needs a sparker, or output lane crosses input lane, or slow recovery time . So a direct LWS...

I6_I6 wrote: ↑

May 22nd, 2026, 9:58 am

p38 dependent reflector loop...
A quick forum search gives no mention of this, so it's probably new.

I guess that makes two things to add to the p38 section of the "dependent reflector" LifeWiki article. There's also this p38 dependent reflector loop by hotcrystal0 from January of this year.

I think the original Snarkmaker may have needed less clearance for it's snarks, which I think begs the question: At what generation does the new snarkmaker become larger than the old design in terms of BB? (and at that point how many snarks have been produced by each design) Probably best to write ...

While I'm thinking of it -- the lists of gift shop ideas from a few years ago don't seem to have ever mentioned T-shirts. We've seen several T-shirt ideas, like the "I Heart CGOL" T-shirt (and lots of other wild ideas in the same thread, some of them tongue-in-cheek borrowed from Spaceballs, and som...

Can anyone run a Bellman search on 3/4-traffic lights? I need a 3/4-traffic light-to-edge-block. I'm thinking you probably know a lot more about the geometry of this request than you're giving here. What creates the 3/4 TL? Which side does the block need to be on? It seems unlikely that anyone who ...

Also, what with this increase in interest and all, I imagine we could be finding variants with lower minimum population. Edit (2026/05/17 09:13): 190G... Yeah, I would expect that somewhere out there in the Space of the Possible there's a sub-1000-cell solifuge variant. It might be tricky to find, ...

Reduced to 202G with some two-glider LOMs and opting to clean up three errant gliders with just two gliders... 192G by getting rid of the last of the blocks in the top block trail: x = 1000, y = 963, rule = B3/S23 196bo$197b2o$196b2o8$215bo6bo$216bo3bobo$214b3o4b2o13$194bo$195bo$193b 3o3$182bo$183b...

I6_I6 wrote: ↑

May 11th, 2026, 3:56 pm

This has got to be known, right? P-to-G+block:

Code: Select all

x = 4, y = 9, rule = B3/S23
2o$2o5$b3o$bo$b3o!

See three-block shifter. Discovered either in 1994 or in 1973, depending on how you count it.

blah wrote: ↑

May 12th, 2026, 3:41 am

I implemented an algorithm and want to mention it by name in my programme, but I forgot its name. I somehow managed to remember it well enough to implement it from memory without remembering what it was called.

2D Prefix Sum / Summed-area table?

Would it work to simply hold periodic conduits to the same standards as stable ones? For all I really know, that might work fine. I just think there would be easily hundreds of thousands of periodic conduits that fit those standard bounding-box and repeat-time measurements -- if people really spent...