ConwayLife.com

But P2 grammar connects different kinds of oscillators in a smooth "seamless" fashion. Nicolay Beluchenko wrote his "Oscichem" (oscillator chemistry) series of articles five years or so ago, proposing an interesting pile of new terminology based on analogies to chemical bonds and the like. Based on...

(Golly cant open ".lif" file extensions.) Depending on the version, Golly may be able to open it... Some .lif files are more complex, and define patterns in terms of sub-components, some of which may be defined in other files. The conversion program doesn't work properly on these. :( Once upon a ti...

...the image.aspx script takes the RLE data in from the querystring, and the querystring automatically strips out any linebreak characters. So, for example, it's absolutely impossible for it to distinguish between: x = 3, y = 32 bo$2bo$3o and x = 3, y = 3 2bo$2bo$3o It's a pretty contrived example,...

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 couple of years back I received an email from Bart Wisialowski, who had put together an interesting summary page of results for Game of Life Sierpinski patterns, including calculations of their fractal dimension. [Meant to post this earlier, but the link didn't seem to be working the last time I t...

Is it possible to finish this? I got so far...only for it to fail in the end. It might be possible to get a Herschel-to-glider or Herschel-to-junk converter out of this, by adding more catalysts in the twenty-odd ticks between the time when the R-pentomino was created and when the R's products dest...

Other than the track.py script is there a complete collection of Herschel track pieces listed in one place? In the LifeWiki, coming soon? I do understand the Hersrch program would have an updated list, but maybe track.py could be updated to include all known tracks. :) Yes, track.py is over a decad...

RLE file viewer This Python program is a fairly basic RLE file viewer... I wrote it to make it possible to easily view RLE files in a file manager (like Konqueror, the KDE file manager). It's not very fast, but for smaller patterns it's faster than starting up Golly, and rather more convenient than...

With just a pond and a boat a new LWSS is formed at 90 degrees. A glider is generated as well. By adding a beehive the remaining mess turns cleanly into a second glider. The incoming spaceship can be any LWSS/MWSS/HWSS thus converting to LWSS at 90 degrees: ... Has anyone made a stable reflector fo...

The first-issue Word document would have come from Robert Wainwright's website, which was shut down along with all of AOL's other "Hometown" pages at the end of last October. You can still find the "LIFEPAGE" site in various lists of Life links -- http://members.aol.com/life1ine/life/ It may be poss...

A bonus problem is to find a good Herschel conduit to connect two or more of these guns together and produce a horizontal LWSS line, adjusting the 'rectifier' reflectors at the left as necessary. I haven't gotten around to this yet -- will post my best solution at the end of the weekend, along with...

A few weeks ago I set up Karel Suhajda's Hersrch utility to hunt for an LWSS-fleet gun as described in the superstring gun discussion . I planned to post the resulting batch-file script, in case anyone wanted a real-life example of a Hersrch search -- and today I finally got around to finishing the ...

I've been following the development of this census-tool idea with great interest. A year or so ago I started messing around with the idea of adding a census utility to Golly, and I did do some work on it. But it turned into a fairly ugly nest of interlocked Python scripts. I wasn't inspired to compl...

So, I've run into pentadecathlons three times now [edit: or maybe two times and it resumed on the same pattern]. Does this mean I've checked something like 1.6mil patterns? (alternatively, I got unlucky, I guess) I think it's a lot less than that -- more like 1.6M divided by the average number of o...

Hmm... I wonder if this proof idea could be emulated for other rules. Some of them clearly have higher speed limits, and others presumably have lower. And if you want to dodge the spaceship speed limit even in plain old Conway's Life, all you have to do is relax the condition about travelling throu...

I am working on a different approach for sending diagonal lightspeed signals. A simple diagonal line of cells, the simplest fuse, burns cleanly at the speed of light. I have already worked out easy ways to send a 1 or a 0 and detect it at the other end. The question is: Can a simple diagonal fuse b...

> Has anything been done regarding patterns from strings of digits, since the > first 2 posts at http://pentadecathlon.com/lifeNews/restricted_patterns/ ? Not too much, to my knowledge. Recent results are mostly catalogued on Dean Hickerson's Web page, which has moved to http://radicaleye.com/DRH/di...

> ...probably using a lot less than the five gliders I've used here: The RLE after the above is the four-glider LWSS recipe, not the alternate superstring cleanup. I want to see the superstring! -- seems as if a clean-burning one would be much easier to use for diagonal lightspeed communication. May...

> I[s] the proof that spaceships can't go faster than c/2 on the net somewhere? You're right, the actual c/2 and c/4 speed limit proofs seem harder to find than they should be. Here's something written by John Conway on 24 Mar 1994, summarizing the original result from much longer ago -- the proofs ...

... Hmm, twork.rar looks like the state after 1K+ ticks, so it doesn't really show the recipe for getting to that point. > With a few* more of these reactions I can return the loaves to where they were and fire another superstring. > Unfortunately I don't know a way to fire gliders so close together...

Added this link in the "Stable Life?" topic last night, then realized it wasn't in your List o' Links... http://nickgotts-eventful.blogspot.com/ ["GoL Patterns with Eventful Histories", about Life patterns that stay "interesting" (meaning unpredictable) for a long time.] MIght also be worth keeping ...

A couple of years ago Bill Gosper got interested in what he called "novelty generators" -- Life patterns whose interactions became more and more complex over time, apparently without limit. Some example starting patterns are given at http://pentadecathlon.com/lifenews/2006/03/by_gosper_and_by_golly_...

> ... as far as I know no such tool currently exists for Life. There is a very extensive database online at pentadecathlon.com, many years in the making -- closing in on 700MB of patterns in Koenig's SOF format, which has better compression than RLE: http://pentadecathlon.com/misc/findForm.shtml But...