Recent Posts

Site Info

Authors
  • H.Koenig
  • Dave Greene

« Frozen LWSS fuse / rake | Main | New 180-degree glider reflector, period 4 and up »

2007 December 17

Engineered Objects
Early MWSS gun in Golly 1.3

Bill Gosper's original p1100 MWSS gun, circa 1984
Bill Gosper's original four-barrelled p1100 MWSS gun, circa 1984
-- perhaps only the 3rd gun pattern constructed in Conway's Life.
The bounding box is over 12,000 cells on a side.
Golly 1.3 was released last month, with a number of useful improvements to editing functionality: unlimited undo/redo support, configurable keyboard shortcuts for scripts and edit operations, and scripting support in Perl as well as Python.

An early LWSS gun by Bill Gosper, constructed around 1984, serves as the Rosetta Stone for the two scripting languages. This is a very large, sparse pattern of centinal reflectors, with a central column of signal splitters that produce the gliders needed to maintain eight p1100 LWSS streams.

The pattern takes up about 60K as RLE, or about 750K as a flat file; it can be reduced to about 5K of Python or Perl script (see Golly 1.3's Scripts collection). The Perl version is somewhat larger, but appears to be able to recreate the pattern slightly faster.

2007-12-16-p1100-MWSS-new.rle
p1100 pure-period MWSS gun (centinals and Herschels)
Dave Greene, 28 September 2007
For comparison purposes, here's a p1100 MWSS gun incorporating Herschel technology, which first became available more than a decade after Gosper's MWSS gun was constructed. This new gun would fit comfortably between most of the adjacent glider trails in the original MWSS gun:

Posted by Dave Greene on 2007 December 17 01:35 |