Game of Life News

Nicolay Beluchenko created some sample diagonal greyships in various shapes, with a "grey" level of 1/3 ON cells (instead of the usual 1/2 for orthogonal greyships with 'stripes' or 'chicken-wire' agars.) Since these new "ships" are really an independent series of tubstretchers and tubeaters packed together as closely as possible, it's obviously possible to move the pieces farther apart from each other to produce lower fractions of ON to OFF cells.

It may also be possible to construct extensible multi-tubstretcher and multi-tubeater spaceships that support this agar -- where each stretcher or eater is connected directly to the next one, and can't be separated -- but this has not been accomplished as yet. Multistretchers and multieaters with wider spacings have been previously posted, however.

Tubstretcher-based patterns composed of more than 1/3 ON cells are not possible. Thus, to produce a diagonal greyship that maintains a 1/2-ON agar, it would be necessary to devise diagonally moving extensible patterns that stabilize the edges of some other type of agar -- either an oscillating agar, or an extensible series of waves (moving wicks), or perhaps an orthogonally symmetric stable pattern -- most likely the 'stripes' agar.

However, since the stripes are not diagonally symmetrical, each of the edges would need a different type of support. Whether such a construction is possible is currently an open question. The main problem is that diagonal spaceships could not repeat at period 4, because each stripe is two cells away from the previous one -- so p8 spaceships would be needed.

Unfortunately p8 is not really within reach of currently available Life search programs (mainly David Bell's 'lifesrc' and Jason Summers' ' WinLifeSearch' port). Some fairly large leaps in efficiency and/or CPU speed would be needed to make this a likely goal. [Readers are, of course, invited to prove this statement wrong -- or to supply the necessary advances in search technology.]