ConwayLife.com

My next arithmetic circuit will multiply two binary numbers together. How are you going to accomplish that? Are you going to use a grid method with AND gates, or use shifts and addition? I think that the latter method is more suited towards your style of computation. I plan to use shifts and additi...

Sounds feasible. We could call it the Game Of Life Distributed Oscillator Research Engine, or GOLD_ORE. :) I think it makes sense to use existing software to do the actual searching, and just write "wrapper" software to handle the distribution & gathering of data. Plus something to crunch the results.

The Oscar script supplied with Golly can find oscillators, including spaceships & knightships. For each generation, calculate a hash value for the pattern. [...] When the current hash matches one of the saved hashes, it is highly likely the pattern is oscillating. By keeping a corresponding list of ...

Oops. I thought that reaction was a vanish reaction! My mistake - I've altered my post to compensate. Thanks for noticing this error. Ah! Now it makes sense. :) Congratulations on the new binary calculators! Since the pattern has a bounding box, I presume it can only calculate Fibonacci numbers up ...

Thanks, Awesomeness! I've also tried using glider synthesis techniques to make some interesting puffers & rakes, but so far my attempts are not very compact. But some of them are amusing, so I may upload them here. Earlier this year, while playing with one of my tiling scripts, I found a glider reac...

That's rather neat, Awesomeness. I like your "assembly line" approach. It may not be so compact, but it makes it very easy to understand what's going on. Well done. There's a fairly small reflector that converts gliders to LWSSs, which you may find useful. See my Fibonacci calculator for an example....

Greetings, MadMan! I was also playing with Life in the early days. Before I got a computer, I'd evolve patterns on the bathroom floor tiles, using plasticine (modeling clay) to mark the cells. I wrote some Life programs on the early home computers, but never did any systematic research. When I "redi...

This script creates p30 memory loops using the duplicator-inverter Queen Bee reaction found by Dietrich Leithner. The loops can be square or rectangular, but if you use rectangles, both dimensions must have the same parity, that is, both must be even or both odd. It's not possible to have loops of m...

More binary arithmetic: the square root of two as a binary fraction, calculated using the continued fraction expansion of root 2. Let N(0) = D(0) = 1 N(1) = 3, D(1) = 2 N(i+1) = 2N(i) + N(i-1) D(i+1) = 2D(i) + D(i-1) Then N(i) / D(i) is the best approximation of root 2 in that neighbourhood, since N...

Binary arithmetic with gliders This circuit calculates the Fibonacci sequence in binary using p60 and p30 glider streams. Output is displayed using LWSS bits. A new Fibonacci number is generated every 2100 generations. The arithmetic unit at the heart of this construction is the amazing Binary Adde...

Here are a few simple glider circuits. A triple vanish reaction, illustrated here using p30 streams. Notice that you can remove any of the 3 gliders & the other two will still vanish when they collide. x = 85, y = 111, rule = B3/S23 4b2o$4b2o8$5bo$4b3o$3b5o$2b2o3b2o4$4b3o$4b3o2$3bo$2bobo$bo3bo$2b3o$...

My first contribution: a bridge for p30 glider streams. I like it! It thins the p30 stream into two p60 streams and crosses them individually, before recombining them? The reason that Dean Hickerson's is more compact is because it uses XOR logic to cross the streams. It creates two pairs of p60 str...

I enjoy making circuits from gliders, with the occasional spaceship or two thrown into the mix. I'll post what I think are some of my more interesting efforts in this thread, as well as some useful circuit components. Please add any of your favourites, preferably your own creations, as well as unusu...

This script allows you to create a block of text in Life. The text is first converted into a bitmap, using a built-in font, then the bitmap pixels are tiled using the currently selected pattern, or a built-in pattern if there is no selection. This script can be used in conjunction with the "bitmap p...

Here's the script I used to create the Marilyn Monroe ticker in the Patterns forum. I was going to write some docs for it, but hopefully, that won't be necessary. :) It uses the current selection as the bitmap source. The ticker is created in a new layer. I hope this script is readable by others & t...

Here's another glider stream generator. It only does gliders (unlike the script above), but it generates them much more efficiently, so it's good for making streams of thousands of gliders. The stream is loaded relative to the top left corner of the current selection. The glider direction can be spe...

Thanks, calcyman! Yes, I created it with a Golly Python script, using an older version of Golly. But yes, it'd be fun to do a colour version. I'll post the script shortly, once I've written some docs for it. And I have a few other scripts I've been meaning to post, that also need docs. I haven't don...

Dean Hickerson's Life pages now have a new home at http://radicaleye.com/DRH/ Excellent! I see Dean has a p30 glider stream bridge. I tried to build one a couple of months ago, using XOR reactions. My first attempts failed, due to off-by-one timing errors, but I eventually achieved success. However...

I recently noticed that the Golly clipboard doesn't hold patterns in bitmap form - it uses RLE. So you can just copy a pattern in Golly & paste it directly into your text editor without having to save the selection in a temporary file. This can be very handy when writing scripts. On a related note, ...

Magic Spaceship gun I like constructing glider circuits, and often need streams of gliders & other spaceships. The script below makes it easy to generate these. It works on any type of space ship. Just select a spaceship & invoke the script. It'll ask you for the stream period & the total number of...

Here's a pattern using the same techniques as the Golly logo ticker, except it "prints" a scrolling picture of Marilyn Monroe. I find it looks best at a scale of 2^2 : 1, viewed from a distance of 2 or 3 metres.

Here's an improved version of the pattern tiling script. It now uses the current clipboard pattern. #Golly Python script #Written by PM 2Ring 2009.3.23 ''' Use the current selection as a template to create a tiled pattern, converting each live cell in the selection into a copy of the clipboard patte...

Here are two glider syntheses I created this week. A pair of p30 guns & eaters, with a glider shuttling between the streams, using the kickback reaction. x = 103, y = 47, rule = s23/b3 74bobo$74b2o$75bo2$54bobo$54b2o$55bo2$16bo$16bobo16bo$16b2o17bobo$obo 10bo21b2o$b2o11b2o40b3o$bo11b2o41bo$57bo2$10b...

I'd imagine that the easiest way to implement this would be to create an RLE of the file in its eight possible rotation/mirror positions and then check to see if any of those RLE codes exist in the database. Sounds good to me. I assume you'd be using some form of hashing to search for patterns in t...

Does every pattern in life stabilise(/become predictable) eventually? I guess it depends on how you want to define "predictable". We can't predict whether a given Turing machine will halt, and we can build Turing machines in Life. For a simpler example, there is a Life pattern that generates twin p...