LifeWiki:News archive

The following is a list of past news items that ran on the Main Page.

Current news

The following news items are currently live on the Main Page:

• April 8: David Bell constructs and refines a puffer demonstrating that all sufficiently high c/4 diagonal rake periods are achievable. Matthias Merzenich uses this to construct a clean p3532+4N rake.
• March 31: Entity Valkyrie builds a complete 2c/3-wire-based pseudo-Heisenburp device with 742-tick repeat time.
• March 27-30: Entity Valkyrie completes a 2c/3 receiver with a repeat time of 876 ticks, which Adam P. Goucher eventually improves to 742 ticks using staged recovery mechanisms; the previous record-setting receivers needed 964 or 970 ticks to recover.
• March 20: Period1GliderGun discovers a period-26 bouncer-based reflector, the first independent reflector of this period, using components by Nico Brown and Dean Hickerson.
• March 19: Keith Amling constructs new p6 c/2 orthogonal greystretchers in which the stripes are bounded by extended tables.
• March 18: Nathaniel Johnston posts a YouTube video about the discovery of the true period-15 glider gun and period-16 glider gun, and the history leading up to those discoveries.
• March 17: James Pascua discovers the first period-16 90-degree independent reflector based on a suggestion by Matthias Merzenich, using the period-16 glider gun to hassle a honey farm predecessor and produce a banana spark. 90-degree reflectors are known for all periods except 14, 17, and 19 with periods 15, 23, and 26 having only dependent reflectors.
• March 16-17: Keith Amling completes a new c/4 diagonal unstable puffer engine (only the third known puffer engine at this speed) based on a partial result by Matthias Merzenich. Caleb R. Hilton uses sparkers to stabilise the unstable engine into explicit puffers. David Bell uses this engine to construct the first p52 c/4 diagonal rake, and "b3s23love" and Merzenich use it to substantially reduce the size of the p108 c/4 diagonal rake.

2021

• April 11: David Raucci finds a new p76 pi-heptomino hassler oscillator, which is quickly reduced to a monomer form by JP21, A for awesome, and Matthias Merzenich.
• April 10-14: Goldtiger997 completes a 152-glider synthesis of a third c/4 orthogonal spaceship, 61P4H1V0.1; within four days this was reduced to an 89-glider synthesis.
• March 19: Matthias Merzenich discovers a new weekender tagalong.
• March 18: Results for the 2020 Pattern of the Year competition include a tie for first place between the Bandersnatch and the Speed Demonoid.
• March 17: A small synthesis efficiency improvement project, 12-in-7 (12-bit still lifes constructed with 7 gliders or less) is completed, with 13 expensive syntheses reduced to below the target cost in less than a week.
• March 17: Pattern of the Year voting, on a record-breaking thirty-nine entries for 2020, will close on March 17th.
• March 12: The 20-bit still life glider synthesis project is completed.
• March 7-8: Goldtiger997 completes a 215-glider recipe for 72P4H1V0, the second c/4 orthogonal spaceship to be synthesized.
• February 10-11: Chris Rowett uses ikpx2 to discover several new moving objects, including a p120 2c/5 puffer and c/5 diagonal tubstretcher, tagalong, and spaceship.
• February 4-11: Tanner Jacobi, EvinZL, Louis-François Handfield and Sphenocorona find new Herschel-to-glider converters and variants of existing H-to-Gs: NW26T157b, NE30T17_NE1T22, NW10T137, SW-18T136 and a Spartan SE16T36b.
• January 11-March 8: Hartmut Holzwart completes several new chicken wire greyships with different widths of chicken wire, with specific examples constructed for widths 2 through 12 among others.
• January 25: Catagolue's B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of one quadrillion objects.
• January 24: goldenratio and bubblegum construct a glider synthesis for edge-repair spaceship 1.
• January 17: wwei23 discovers 1320P7, a large but high-clearance period-7 sparker oscillator.
• January 16: Dylan Chen discovers 52513M, the new longest-lasting known methuselah within a 16×16 bounding box, just a week after the discovery of 50093M.
• January 16: Adam P. Goucher completes a 2c/5 waveguide for an oblique line of ants based on a partial result by Matthias Merzenich.
• January 10: Alex Greason makes available a fresh set of transfer.py results. Fewer than 535 20-bit still lifes have no known glider synthesis, and 135 of these have soups available on Catagolue to assist with synthesis.
• January 10: Dylan Chen discovers 328P7H3V0, another new 3c/7 spaceship, using Andrew J. Wade's December update to LSSS. This is the first small 3c/7 spaceship with gutter symmetry.
• January 9: Rob Liston discovers 50093M, the longest-lasting known methuselah within a 16×16 bounding box, using apgsearch.
• January 5: Bullet51 uses ikpx2 to find a third elementary c/6 diagonal spaceship, 282P6H1V1.
• January 5: Martin Grant discovers a new variant of a known H-to-G conduit, NE16T14, with likely applications as a reflector and merge circuit in single-channel self-constructing circuitry.
• January 5: Sphenocorona and Luka Okanishi assemble a new elementary conduit, HF96P, which allows for the creation of several new Herschel-to-glider converters.
• January 2-3: bubblegum discovers a new 3c/7 orthogonal puffer engine, allowing Matthias Merzenich and iNoMed to construct the first clean 3c/7 rake.

2020

• December 28-31: Dylan Chen discovers Anura ([1]) and Soba ([2]), the two smallest known 3c/7 orthogonal spaceships, as stabilizations of the same frontend, and also a much smaller front end for the spaghetti monster on January 4.([3])
• December 28: The New York Times publishes an article reflecting on 50 years of Conway's Game of Life.
• December 20: A Bellman search by Tanner Jacobi turns up a new stable catalyst that can reset a beehive that has been pushed over by one cell by a collision.
• December 17: Tanner Jacobi discovers a p61 pattern that moves one cell per cycle, and can be supported by single-bit sparks, glider streams, or additional copies of the pattern on each side.
• December 15: Matthias Merzenich constructs the first true period-28 glider gun.
• December 6: John Winston Garth discovers doo-dah, a new small period-21 tagalong for the weekender, which can be used to create various 2c/7 orthogonal puffers and rakes.
• December 5: MathAndCode and yujh discover 'NW26T157', a new Spartan conduit that converts a Herschel into three gliders, similar to NW31 but with one glider on an output lane of a different color.
• December 3-4: Goldtiger997 finds a final step for a turtle synthesis, followed by a complete 241-glider synthesis the next day.
• November 24: Goldtiger997 completes a barge crosser, a mechanism which allows a glider signal to cross an arbitrarily long barge without causing permanent damage.
• November 18: Goldtiger997 finds glider recipes that can convert M2 minstrels into M3 minstrels and vice versa.
• November 15: wwei23 discovers a new sparker, a period-9 version of a heavyweight emulator.
• October 30: Golly 4.0 is officially released.
• October 16: Andrew Trevorrow makes available the first beta builds for Golly 4.0, supporting Python 3.x and new rule types and neighborhoods, and enabling multi-color "Super" and "History" support for a wide range of two-state rules.
• September 27: A burloaferimeter variant appears in an asymmetric soup found by Rob Liston, making it the first natural period-7 oscillator.
• September 26: Pavel Grankovskiy completes Speed Demonoid version 2, removing the 2c/9 limitation; a Golly script can now build a spaceship with any rational diagonal speed below c/4 (subject to some practical size limitations).
• September 19: MathAndCode and Adam P. Goucher construct a 17-glider reverse caber-tosser, proving that all synthesizable patterns can be made with no more than 17 gliders and that all synthesizable still lifes can be constructed with no more than one glider per bit.
• September 19: Goldtiger997 synthesizes 55P9H3V0, the first period-9 spaceship to be synthesized.
• September 18: Pavel Grankovskiy constructs a complete Speed Demonoid, using double crabstretchers to accelerate a self-constructing spaceship to 3492022/17833792=1746011/8916896 ≈ 0.1958c, very close to c/5. The new spaceship can be adjusted to match any rational speed slower than 2c/9.
• September 15: wwei23 discovers several new 3-engine Corderships, including one that cleans up its trailing blocks with sideways gliders, similar to a 5-, 6-, or 7-in-a-row Cordership.
• September 9-17: wwei23 assembles a new type of period-192 4-in-a-row Cordership, and later constructs glider-to-Cordership and Cordership-to-glider converters for it.
• August 29: Goldtiger997 completes a synthesis of the first known 2c/5 spaceship, 44P5H2V0, almost thirty years after its discovery; this is the third completed synthesis for a 2c/5 spaceship.
• August 23: Adam P. Goucher adds to slmake a fast elbow push recipe created by Pavel Grankovskiy, based on a c/4 diagonal crab wickstretcher. This means that recipes for self-constructing structures with a not-quite-attainable limit speed of c/4 can now be semi-automatically compiled.
• August 16: Tanner Jacobi discovers a 14-glider recipe for a crab spaceship, down from the previous cost of 16, which can be used to reduce the size and construction cost of a wickstretcher seed.
• August 14: Rob Liston finds via apgsearch a third natural loafer emerging from asymmetric soup.
• August 10: Syntheses of a variety of pufferfish spaceships make their way to Catagolue, thanks to an extension of the time required in online recipe submissions for all gliders to react.
• August 2-18: Tanner Jacobi completes and later improves a 1G seed for a c/4 diagonal wickstretcher, enabling self-constructing spaceships with the fastest possible diagonal speed of (just below) c/4.
• July 29: Goldtiger997 constructs a fast diagonal Demonoid puffer with velocity (4825784,4825784)c/45679544.
• July 21: Adam P. Goucher reduces the cost of the reverse caber-tosser constructor to 32 gliders.
• July 20: A for awesome completes a new stable L122 Herschel conduit, based on a P2 periodic variant by Entity Valkyrie.
• July 18: A glider synthesis of 70P2H1V0.1 is posted to Catagolue by Martin Grant, making 70P2H1V0.1 the first period-2 spaceship to be synthesized.
• July 7: Goldtiger997 completes a record-breaking seed constellation that, when triggered by a single gliders, turn into a clean 100-glider recipe for a c/5 spaceship, 58P5H1V1. This potentially improves the unreachable upper bound on Demonoid speed from c/12 to c/5.
• July 1: A collaborative effort results in a series of HWSS Heisenburp circuits much smaller than the previous best known devices. Recovery time is under 1400 ticks. Some versions can also detect flotillas with an HWSS along one edge.
• June 20-30: Several new signal converter circuits are constructed, including Luka Okanishi's 242-tick 30P5H2V0-to-G and Goldtiger997's 290-tick HWSS-to-G. Many others are catalogued here.
• June 6-30: JP21's and then Jeremy Tan's eater collections spark new interest, and eaters are found for several previously inedible spaceships such as dragon, Canada goose, and brain.
• June 8: A collaborative effort produces a fully universal *WSS-to-glider converter that recovers in only 588 ticks, and works even if moved by an odd number of cells along the input lane.
• June 7: Matthias Merzenich completes an adjustable-width c/5 orthogonal wickstretcher using components by Keith Amling and Hartmut Holzwart.
• June 5: Entity Valkyrie completes a mechanism suggested by Martin Grant to make a Bandersnatch, a glider-constructible color-changing glider shifter with a recovery time of only 70 ticks.
• May 25: Louis-François Handfield and Goldtiger997 find improved highway robbers with better clearance and 876- and 873-tick recovery times.
• May 22: Entity Valkyrie constructs a gun for 58P5H1V1, the first gun to produce a c/5 diagonal spaceship.
• May 9: The silverfish, a self-supporting 31c/240 caterpillar-type spaceship designed using the slow salvo recipe from the Centipede but a simpler front end, is completed.
• May 6: Goldtiger997 solves the problem of glider-constructing all pseudo still lifes consisting of 4×N chunks of blocks agar.
• May 3-4: Louis-François Handfield adapts Martin Grant's new HL161H conduit to make a new compact color-changing edge shooter, HSW47T214.
• Apr. 21: Rob Liston discovers 49768M, the longest-lasting known methuselah fitting within a 16×16 bounding box.
• Apr. 11: John Horton Conway, the inventor of Conway's Game of Life, dies in Princeton, NJ at the age of 82.
• Apr. 8: Louis-François Handfield constructs a much faster and more compact universal regulator.
• Apr. 3: Goldtiger997, Tanner Jacobi, and others complete the glider synthesis for 58P5H1V1, the first synthesis for a c/5 diagonal spaceship.
• Apr. 1: A loafer appears for the first time in an asymmetric soup, submitted to Catagolue by John Goodman. Coincidentally, this occurred exactly two years after Dave Greene posted a fake soup for April Fools' Day 2018.
• Mar. 25: Martin Grant and others complete the glider synthesis for 56P6H1V0, the first synthesis for a c/6 orthogonal spaceship and the first for a period-6 spaceship.
• Mar. 22: Andrew J. Wade uses life_slice_ship_search to find 186P7H2V0, a third 2c/7 orthogonal spaceship, part of an infinite family based on a known 2c/7 wave.
• Mar. 22: Goldtiger997 completes the activation stage for a recipe for 56P6H1V0, which along with the spider and weekender is now one of the largest elementary spaceships for which a glider synthesis can (presumably) be completed.
• Mar. 17: Andrew J. Wade discovers 409P6H1V0, the narrowest known c/6 orthogonal spaceship, using life_slice_ship_search.
• Mar. 9: Richard K. Guy, discoverer of the glider, passes away at the age of 103.
• Feb. 9: Rob Liston discovers a new p16 oscillator, Rob's p16, using apgsearch. It is the smallest known p16 by both population and bounding box, the first p16 to appear from an asymmetric soup, the first strictly volatile p16, and the first new rotor to be discovered by asymmetric soup search since the 1980s.
• Feb. 8: All 19-bit still lifes are confirmed to have valid glider syntheses.
• Jan. 26: Dave Greene creates LifeSuper, an extended version of LifeHistory for advanced pattern annotation.
• Jan. 26: Entity Valkyrie constructs a period-11040 spider gun, the first gun to fire a c/5 orthogonal spaceship.
• Jan. 13: Matthias Merzenich sets up a new "manually distributed" search (table here), to find out whether a symmetric c/8 spaceship exists at width 19.
• Jan. 9: Nathaniel Johnston completes a long-running enumeration of 34-bit still lifes, finding 35,422,864,104 strict still lifes with 34 bits, and 41,058,173,683 pseudo still lifes with the same bit count, including 26 triple pseudo still lifes.
• Jan. 5: A Rules namespace update on the LifeWiki allows LifeViewer to display in-browser many patterns using rule tables and trees, which previously couldn't be simulated without copying them into Golly.

2019

• Dec. 30: Andrew J. Wade uses his search program, life_slice_ship_search, to find the second elementary 2c/7 spaceship, scholar.
• Dec. 29: Goldtiger997 synthesises a variant of David Hilbert.
• Dec. 28: Martin Grant finds a counterexample to a 22-year old conjecture by Dean Hickerson about still-life finitization.
• Dec. 25: Pavgran assembles Slavic [4], a quadratic-growth pattern similar to Hydra that doesn't need a central gun.
• Dec. 9: Goldtiger997 reduces the cost of the spider synthesis by over 100 gliders.
• Dec. 1: Martin Grant discovers a new period-49 oscillator based on a partial result by Jason Summers.
• Nov. 24: Luka Okanishi discovers a period-23 oscillator, leaving only four periods for which no non-trivial oscillator is known.
• Nov. 20: Dongook Lee finds a p7 pipsquirter that is significantly smaller than the old p7 pipsquirter, leading to bounding-box reductions in the gun collection and various oscillators.
• Nov. 18: Tanner Jacobi, Goldtiger997 and others find improved recipes for a number of difficult-to-synthesize still lifes, reducing the maximum cost for 16-bit still lifes to 14 gliders.
• Nov. 17: Michael Simkin uses pi calculator and Osqrtlogt technology to build a Life pattern that prints the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall".
• Nov. 12: Bullet51 and Aidan F. Pierce discover new sparky period-13 oscillators.
• Nov. 4: Alex Greason, Arie Paap, BlinkerSpawn, and Dongook Lee collaborate on the discovery of phoenix agar oscillators on different-sized tori, which can reproduce the behavior of XOR oscillators in other rules (see OEIS A160657).
• Oct. 28: Goldtiger997 finds a 64-glider synthesis for the 27P4H1V1 spaceship (later reduced to 31 gliders).
• Oct. 22: Goldtiger997 constructs a p612 gun for the 46P4H1V0 spaceship.
• Oct. 9: All 18-bit still lifes are confirmed to have valid glider syntheses.
• Sep. 9: The 17-in-17 Project is completed, showing that every 17-bit still life can be constructed using at most 16 gliders.
• Aug. 15: Update to a previous news item from 21 April 2019 (see archive): all 15-bit still lifes can now be constructed with at most 12 gliders.
• July 16: Dave Greene constructs a large prime oscillator with a period equal to the largest Mersenne prime currently known, 2^82589933-1.
• June 19: A huge long-term collaborative effort is completed, showing that all glider-constructible still lifes can (at least in theory) be constructed using less than two gliders per bit.
• June 2: Goldtiger997 completes a glider-to-25P3H1V0.2 converter, based on Martin Grant's 25P3H1V0.2 synthesis from 2017.
• May 29: Thomas Cabaret makes available a Passe-Science video featuring self-constructing CA patterns, including several minutes showing details of the 0E0P metacell.
• May 25: Goldtiger997 completes a glider-to-crab converter, with the help of a script implementing a universal glider synchronization toolkit.
• May 24-30: christoph.r posts several unusual breeder designs based on c/10 technology, including some variants on a pufferfish breeder.
• May 9: GilGil makes available a huge but elegant 60-line printer traveling at c/10, based on fleets of fireships.
• Apr. 21: Improvements to glider syntheses mean that every 15-bit still life has a recipe with at most 13 gliders. For current maximum costs, see the table in Still-life syntheses.
• Apr. 17: Tanner Jacobi and Matthias Merzenich set several new bounding-box records with a new glider gun mechanism based on filtered MWSSes.
• Apr. 14: Michael Simkin completes a self-constructing puffer pattern which he calls Remini ("retro Gemini"), using a single-channel design with nothing but 1970s circuit mechanisms.
• Apr. 10: Jeremy Tan releases a new glider recipe database, Shinjuku, specifically for tracking lowest-cost syntheses.
• Apr. 6-7: LifeViewer standardizes support for triangular neighbourhoods starting with Build 320.
• Apr. 5: An exhaustive computer search run by Nathaniel Johnston reveals that there are 14,223,867,298 strict and 15,851,861,075 pseudo 33-bit still lifes, including eleven pseudo still lifes that can be partitioned into three stable pieces but not two, and none that can be partitioned into four stable pieces but not two or three.[5]
• Mar. 27: The last remaining 14-bit still life, xs14_4ai3zwo9a4, appears in a C1 soup on Catagolue, in a haul submitted by an anonymous user.[6]
• Mar. 24: apgsearch v5.03 gains the ability to log 'megasized' soups with final populations exceeding 3,000.[7] apgsearch 5.x can also pre-process asymmetric C1 B3/S23 soups on GPUs with CUDA support.[8]
• Mar. 7: A spider synthesis using 574 gliders and 9 LWSSes is found by Martin Grant. [9]
• Mar. 3: A period-120 oscillator, the highest period thus far, occurs from a natural soup on Catagolue.
• Mar. 2: Several symmetric-soup diehards with lifespans over 1500 ticks are found by 'carybe', using apgsearch.
• Feb. 12: A lightweight Schick engine appears from a natural (C1) soup on Catagolue.
• Feb. 9: A 47,575-tick 16x16 methuselah found by Adam Goucher via apgsearch yields a 16-cell, 47,487-tick methuselah. This discovery skips over several empty 1000-tick bins in Catagolue above the previous record 16x16 methuselah, Homer.
• Feb. 4: A glider detection and removal upgrade in apgsearch version 4.91 gives a search speed boost of well over 50% compared to version 4.88.
• Feb. 4: Tanner Jacobi and Martin Grant find a recipe, subsequently reduced to 88 gliders, for the first-ever synthesizable c/4 spaceship, 46P4H1V0.
• Jan. 21 - Feb. 1: Additional (2,1)c/6 minstrels and spaceship connections are found, bringing the number of combinations of elementary minstrels into double digits.
• Jan. 25: the Pattern of the Year 2018 competition concludes, with Sir Robin taking first place.
• Jan. 25: LifeViewer build 282 goes live on the LifeWiki and forums, with several enhancements including new labeling functionality.
• Jan. 20: Catagolue collects a record-setting longest-lived asymmetrical 16x16 diehard, with a lifespan of 1058 ticks.
• Jan. 17: A new period-8 domino sparker, 230P8, is discovered by Arie Paap and reduced by 'Bullet51'.
• Jan 16-18: Four new minstrels are found, plus a lucky connection of an existing minstrel to knightwave, creating for the first time a grammar that allows for an infinite number of distinct elementary knightships.
• Jan 10: A new period-24 oscillator, dueling banjos, turns up in an apgsearch soup search. Uses so far include a smaller period-24 glider gun, with associated improvements to p16 and p48 glider guns and a p48 LWSS gun.
• Jan 3-7: Record-setting diehards are found by Rob Liston and Apple Bottom via apgsearch.

2018

• Dec 7: A new oblique camelship, much smaller and lower population than the Gemini 3 variant from 2010, is completed by Chris Cain.
• Dec 2: The value of V, the lowest number for which an oscillator can be constructed with strict volatility 1 for that or any higher period, is reduced to 3,506,909 ticks.
• Nov 30: Adam P. Goucher sets another new record using the latest apgsearch by finding "Homer", a 16x16 methuselah with a lifespan of 42883 ticks.
• Nov 28: An update to slsparse allows it to recognize 45-degree MWSS-to-G converters in any orientation, and use unidirectional slow salvo recipes to construct them.
• Nov 18: Entity Valkyrie discovers a new period-13 FNG suppression mechanism, allowing the true period-52 glider gun to be reduced to less than a seventh of its previous size.
• Nov 12: A working 0E0P metacell is announced by Adam P. Goucher, along with several improvements to slmake, the program used to compile the metacell.
• Oct 31: An update to apgsearch sets another new record by finding a 16x16 methuselah with a lifespan of 42,100 ticks.
• Oct 31: A self-constructing "loopship", a new type of spaceship with a non-Geminoid design, is completed by Dave Greene.
• Oct 30: A periodic (p5 or p4) quinti-Snark is constructed by Tanner Jacobi, with the usual implications for reductions to the glider gun collection.
• Oct 29: apgluxe v4.56-ll2.0.5 and Catagolue add support for BSFKL rules.
• Oct 28: A record-setting 39,693-tick methuselah, Wilma, is discovered by Rob Liston using a custom FPGA soup searcher.
• Oct 27: An new LWSS synthesis by Chris Cain allows for LWSS, MWSS, and HWSS guns with pseudo periods as low as 18. 18 is the minimum for HWSS streams.)
• Oct 21: Hartmut Holzwart completes a two-dimensionally extensible wick-supporting pushalong with a minimum width of over a thousand cells.
• Oct 21: New Orthogonoids with periods 2²⁷ and 2²⁸ are constructed by Dave Greene, followed by a 2²⁵ version by Adam P. Goucher.
• Oct 12: A new period-14 oscillator, 34P14.1, is found by 'carybe'.
• Oct 11: Christoph R. discovers a new Fireship tagalong.
• Oct 10: Dave Greene completes the construction of two new HashLife-friendly Demonoids.
• Oct 07: A complex 140-glider synthesis of a c/2 signal traveling along a diagonal long^N barge wire is completed by Martin Grant.
• Oct 03: A p4 bouncer reflector is constructed by Arie Paap. With the p9 reflector, this completes the set of colour-changing and colour-preserving reflectors with periods from 4 to 9.
• Oct 02: A p9 reflector is discovered by Matthias Merzenich and "carybe" based on Noam Elkies' bouncer reaction. This is the first reflector capable of reflecting a p27 glider stream.
• Oct 02: A true p33 gun is discovered by Arie Paap and Matthias Merzenich.
• Sep 27: A true p52 gun is completed by a collaborative effort.
• Sep 9: Dave Greene completes the construction of a stable line crosser with a repeat time of 501 ticks.
• Jul 15/19: The Minstrels, a group of tagalongs for Sir Robin, are discovered.
• Jun 14: The construction of a reverse caber-tosser shows that any glider-constructible object can be constructed with at most 35 gliders.
• Apr 04: A p3 reflector is discovered by Arie Paap based on Tanner Jacobi's bumper reaction. This is the first reflector capable of reflecting a p39 glider stream.
• Mar 06: Sir Robin, the first elementary knightship in Life, is discovered by Adam P. Goucher and Tom Rokicki.
• Feb 19: The 2-engine Cordership wins the 2017 Pattern of the Year competition, with Tanner's p46 taking second place.

Also see

• LifeWiki:Did you know archive