Unusual Growth Rates
Pi In A Cloudy Sky
Unusual Growth Rates
Update:Until recently, Dean Hickerson's Life pages have been available only in Web-archive form, with no images available.
The image at right is from an intriguing family of patterns constructed in mid-2006. The family includes 'Life Computes Pi' and a number of 'Clouds' variants. There's really no substitute for watching these evolve in real time in a high-speed Life simulator, but a few surprising pictures of later stages of their evolution are shown below.
The pattern to the right is the starting configuration for 'Life Computes Pi', which consists of four breeders creating lines of guns that recursively stifle each other's output. The gliders appear to be spiraling outward, but in fact each set of four guns affects only itself, and any finite area around the center of the pattern will eventually repeat an earlier state.
As the number of ticks (t) increases, the population of the entire pattern approximates (pi-2)/720 t^2. At four million ticks, when the images below were captured, this works out to a value of pi correct to two places after the decimal point... so this is not quite the most efficient way to calculate pi.
The image to the right shows the large-scale shape generated by this family of objects after several million generations. The variant shown here is known as 'Clouds', because a complex feedback effect between the quadrants creates ever-larger rough-edged clouds of gliders as the pattern grows in size.
