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Probably "one-time conduit" is appropriate. I found several of these, but the following one-time conduit is unique among all I have seen because each track piece releases enough gliders to rebuild itself! Wow! A compact stable 90° glider reflector would be so useful. I just noticed earlier today th...

Is there a single glider reaction which flips a loaf? Yes, there's the following famous reaction: It's used as the mechanism behind the eater3. You can see the eater3 in the corner of my rectifier reflector, which is displayed as my avatar. Ah, yes. That's what I was thinking of, but I've never inv...

Since that gun has a hole at the back, the stream it produces can be made (at least) 4 times as thick by simply stacking them one behind the other. It's easy to do with 2 or 3 copies, but then things start to get messy. Curiously, the height of this gun is 414 = 6*69. I tried separations of 7*69 & ...

A pair of gliders consume eaters laid down by four puffers. Inspired by Dean Hickerson's Spiral Decay (found in the Life32 collection), which does a similar thing using boats instead of eaters. EaterPuffersGliderTurnersFast0.rle x = 135, y = 145, rule = B3/S23 49b3o11b3o$49bo2bo10bo2bo$49bo6b3o4bo7b...

This reaction shifts the loaf by (-1, 3) without turning it. This reaction is slightly faster than the turning reaction, and takes up less space. But by itself it's not much use for constructing fixed oscillators. It might be useful in a rake / puffer construction, though. Or when combined with Extr...

Thanks, calcyman. And thanks Dave! Here's an almost-conduit. (Is there a proper name for such patterns?) The Herschel deletes the first snake it encounters as it passes through, and leaves a blinker in its wake. Unfortunately, snakes aren't easy to rebuild. A straight glider synthesis takes 5 glider...

I was recently investigating if it's possible to remove & replace one of the end blocks of a standard p30 glider gun without disrupting the gun function. You can use only one Glider Gun on each end and achieve the same result: (Or am I missing something?) That's neat. You're not missing anything; I...

Here's an adjustable Herschel-based LWSS gun, built from a pattern posted here back in early June. Sorry, I can't remember who posted the original. The input Herschel is generated by a glider to Herschel converter. The glider comes from an adjustable Herschel track loop, with period 774 +4n. To adju...

Here's an updated version of the RLE file viewer posted above. It now uses a library function to do the scaling, rather than doing it "by hand" in Python, so it's much faster. Also, it will now output the pattern to stdout in ".o" format, if verbosity is set to 2 or greater. #!/usr/bin/env python ''...

LWSS fanout This LWSS fanout is similar to the one posted recently by Calcyman in Nathaniel's "Prime quadruplet calculator" thread, but slightly smaller, with less delay on the new LWSS stream. MyLWSSfanoutA.rle x = 183, y = 78, rule = B3/S23 97b2o$97b2o4$97bo$96bobo$95bo3bo$96b3o$94b2o3b2o9$89b2o$...

Switchable p300 and p150 glider gun Streams from a pair of standard p30 guns react & release a p150 stream and a p300 stream. The p300 stream is switchable. The switch is a blinker that normally appears at the right of the pattern from step 117 until step 242. The p300 stream only produces a glider...

The case of the disappearing glider gun block. I was recently investigating if it's possible to remove & replace one of the end blocks of a standard p30 glider gun without disrupting the gun function. This is as close as I can get. :) A pair of head-on p30 glider streams attempt to destroy & create...

My Javascript's a bit rusty, but IIRC it does have some Regular Expression support. I'll see what I can do with that. In the meantime, here's a slightly optimized version of the above. As well as being more compact, it avoids use of a global Javascript variable. Use of identifiers in these inline Ja...

If any of these instructions aren't clear enough, please let me know. I got this to work in Google Chrome for the sample glider RLE, but not for RLE text from GMail messages or Google Notebook entries. Apparently JavaScript can't dig a selection out of whatever weird and wonderful AJAX stuff Google...

A ridiculously large pulsar puffer, built from a pair of MWSS orthogonal rakes. It lays the pulsar in all 3 phases. MWSSPulsarPuffer0.rle x = 339, y = 385, rule = B3/S23 206b2o$205b4o$204b2ob2o$205b2o2$211b2o$210bobo$213bo$208bo4bo$32b6o 175bo$32bo5bo$32bo178b2o$33bo4bo171bo$35b2o143b2o$179b2ob3o24b...

This is advise the users of this forum that I am frustrated by patterns presented in GOLLY or RLE as I can not decipher them. I am therefore seriously considering abandoning this forum ,even to just view it. There are other LIFE websites which present patterns in a visual way I can use. I also get ...

Online RLE viewer. This Javascript "bookmarklet" simplifies the task of viewing small RLE strings online, using the facilities of this website. Just save it into the Links folder of your Favourites or Bookmarks, and it'll put a button in your Links bar (it can also be operated as a menu item in Fav...

(Golly cant open ".lif" file extensions.) Depending on the version, Golly may be able to open it. There's a program that comes with xlife called lifeconv (or something like that) that can convert many older .lif files into Life 1.05 format, which looks like this: #Life 1.05 #D Acorn #D The most vig...

Here are some 3 spaceship formations that turn gliders (and may also change the glider phase). Found by a script that still needs considerable work (I'll post it when it gets less false positives). Inspired by reading in the Life Lexicon article on Glider Turners that "small rearrangements of the ba...

After seeing Calcyman's intriguing patterns, I've finally started playing with Herschel based patterns. I'm glad to have inspired you. My most recent, and most impressive, stable configuration is this: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Spartan_universal_computer-constructor Now that is...

Meanwhile, yes, the best bet is to download Hersrch (good gravy, that file still says "not downloaded yet" -- are Herschel tracks really _that_ scary?). You don't have to run it or anything, just decompress it and look in the "data" subfolder Thanks for that info, Dave. I'll check it out & add them...

RLE file viewer This Python program is a fairly basic RLE file viewer. It uses the GTK library to create the display & handle the user interface. It is a standalone program, not a Golly script. I wrote it to make it possible to easily view RLE files in a file manager (like Konqueror, the KDE file m...

A few months ago, I downloaded Mark D. Niemiec's RLE2TXT, a C program that converts RLE files to "dot star" and other simple ASCII formats. Unfortunately, a logic bug causes this program to make errors when decoding some patterns, for example this simple glider-eater combination. :( http://www.conwa...

Herschel track builder, using David Buckinghams 8 original Herschel conduits and Paul Callahan's variable sized Herschel transceiver. Please read the notes at the start of the script for more info. I will improve this script, once I have more basic conduits to add to DJB's set of 8. I may also add l...

A simple script to find the minimum & maximum population counts of a pattern. # Golly python script. # Written by PM 2Ring, July 2009 ''' Evolve current pattern step by step, tracking population ''' from glife import * import golly def popcount(): prompt = 'Enter number of generations :' data = gets...