Harmut Holzwart has found an new Period 5 2c/5
Spaceship.
Nicolay Beluchenko then found that a spark from this object could be used to convert
Lightweight Spaceships into Gliders. He used this reaction to create the Period 150 Pseudo-Rake
shown here. The Spacehip Gun at the bottom generates a stream where each spaceship becomes
a forward-moving Glider.
Victor Pecanins noticed that a previously known Spaceship escorted flotilla (42P20H10V0) could have its central element extended by several bits.
Mark Niemiec then came up with constructions for both these flotillas. And as he points out, there are certainly more variations with different length ships out there.
Jason Summers has found some new spaceship constuctions. These are the type where a pair of Lightweight or Middleweight Spaceships are used to escort a togalong or or other unstable engine.
First is a way to build a 32 bit Period 4 Spaceship which consists of an "A" tagalong supported
by a pair of Lightweight Spaceships [32P4H2V0.5], constructed by firing
thirteen Gliders into a pair of Fishhook Eaters and a Boat.
Next is a construction that uses eleven Gliders to build a 32 Bit Period 20 Spaceship which consists of a
B-Heptomino Engine supported by a pair of Lightweight Spaceships and a Glider
[32P20H10V0.1]. The Glider tagalong suppresses a
very messy exhaust from a period 20 engine, turning it into simple Spaceship.
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a few more new Period 4 diagonal c/4 spaceships.
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a Period 5 c/5 diagonal tubeater. Shown here is a Period 4 c/4 tubstretcher forming a growing spaceship.
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a few new c/5 Diagonal spaceships,
including one, at 67 bits, which is the smallest currently known.
Here are separate commented files for Beluchenko's previous wave-based spaceships in this series, from 7 April 2006, posted last month in a combined pattern:
spaceship made with wave ends
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a way to stablize the edges and corners of the Period 4 Snowflake
Agar, allowing the creation of Period 4 Oscillators.
Other components exist, which can be used to create these simplest forms of the agar oscillator.
Nicolay Beluchenko found a way to terminate some c/4 Waves
found earlier by Hartmut Holzwart, allowing for the creation of a variety of spaceships.
Paul Tooke's spaceship searches have come up with a new c/6 Orthogonal Spaceship.
Here a number of new Game of Life objects discovered in the past few months, in no particular order:
A Period 360 c/5 spaceship found by David Bell. Removing one or two of the circulating gliders gives a Period 1080 spaceship instead
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a 20 bit variant on a known Period 3 oscillator.
Scot Ellison has found a set of Period 7 Oscillators, one as small as having a population of 38 Bits, which have some isolated sparks in one of their phases.
A pair of Diagonal c/4 Double Wickstretchers found by Nicolay Beluchenko.
A tagalong for the recently discovered Diagonal c/6 Spaceship, found by Nicolay Beluchenko.
long and short c/3 ships with central p15/5 wick
Hartmut Holzwart, 7 December 2005
Over the past few months, Hartmut Holzwart has constructed a series of spaceships with a variety of shapes, periods, and velocities. The majority have been "greyships" of different types — but here is a random sampling of ships that don't fit neatly into that category:
extensible thin orthogonal 2c/4 spaceship
Hartmut Holzwart, 16 November 2005
extensible p3 spaceship: a p22 wick stabilized by c/3 ships
Hartmut Holzwart, 14 November 2005
Harmut Holzwart has found a few new c/4 Diagonal Spaceships.
Based on them, Nicolay Beluchenko then came up with another set of such spaceships by combining them with parts of other ships found earlier.
Here's another batch of new c/4 Diagonal Spaceships that
Nicolay Beluchenko has found.
Harmut Holzwart has extended a few of these new spaceships by adding some tagalongs for which there was previously no spaceship for attachment.
Nicolay Beluchenko has found the first known c/6 Diagonal Spaceship.
Nicolay Beluchenko has found another batch of new c/4 Diagonal Spaceships.
As before, these are all presented in no particular order.
On June 24th, David Bell produced an optimized version of Jason Summers' original lineship (shown in reduced scale at right -- click the thumbnail for the RLE, or here for a full picture). There have been several further developments along these lines.
dgreene used some of David Bell's new compact Cordership technology to produce a modified tail section for the revised lineship which repeats at p768 instead of at p96.
[The thumbnail at right shows only the modified tail section -- click here for a picture of the full pattern.]
David Bell followed this with a redesigned diagonal c/12 period 96 lineship. In this variant, the creation of the line at the front is done in pieces which are then welded together to form the line, using the repair techniques described in the "Cutting and Repairing Diagonal Lines" posting. The back end has also been reduced, since a sideways rake is not needed to ignite the line.
Again, only the smaller back end is shown in the thumbnail; a full-sized image is here.
The Cordership at the tail end of the adjustable-period lineship shown at right (full-sized image here) is responsible for igniting the stabilized end of line whenever it gets near to it. Nicolay Beluchenko points out that this Cordership could be adjusted by moving the trailing Cordership by multiples of 22 cells diagonally, rather than 88, if the front of the line were constructed in length-22 segments as well (but this would make the front of the ship much larger).
Nicolay Beluchenko has found a host of new c/4 Diagonal Spaceships. The smallest
has only a population of 40 bits. Many of these are related by being made up of simpler subparts, having extensible
sections, or by adding tagalongs to previously known spaceships. Except for the sample shown at right, these are all
presented in no particular order.
Around the end of July, Nicolay Beluchenko and Hartmut Holzwart produced a series of "anteater" spaceship patterns which could provide a moving c/4 diagonal termination point for an oblique wave of "ants". "Ants" wicks are unusually versatile, in that each eight-bit "ant" can follow directly behind the previous ant, or it can be offset by either one or two cells.
In the patterns that follow, each ant must be offset one cell from the previous one. With this configuration, each individual ant is a P1 pattern that travels due south at the speed of light, but the wave of ants as a whole can also be interpreted as a P4 pattern traveling northwest at c/4, thus matching the speed and direction of the c/4 terminal pattern.
The waves of ants should be assumed to extend to infinity (so don't run these spaceships for too many ticks -- they tend to crash when they run out of ants.) The construction of a matching antstretcher for these anteaters is currently an open problem.
Left: c/4 diagonal anteater: Nicolay Beluchenko, 29 July 2005
Right: c/4 double anteater
Left: c/4 anteater-related spaceships
Right: anteater-related double puffer based on Hartmut Holzwart's 29-bit spaceship (B29)
Left: c/4 anteater connected to puffer: Nicolay Beluchenko, 29 July 2005
Right: central glide-symmetric anteater element used as a tagalong: Nicolay Beluchenko, 30 July 2005
Left: alternate anteaters connected to sparking ships using glide-reflecting tagalong elements: Nicolay Beluchenko, 30 July 2005
Right: small anteater based on c/4 domino-spark ship: Hartmut Holzwart, 4 August 2005
Nicolay Beluchenko has noticed that a previously known spaceship can be converted into a small Tubstretcher. As shown at left, the four blue bits convert the ship into the smallest known puffer of any variety.
This puffer can be combined with a Tub burning fuse, found by Harmut Holzwart, to create spaceships of any length. The smallest, at 74 bits, is shown here. (The Tub fuse is hilighted in blue.)
Nicolay Beluchenko has found some new
c/4 diagonal spaceships. He also noticed that
some previously known spaceships can be reworked and combined to yield a series of extensible ships.
Finally, he also discovered a 150 Bit Period 28 diagonal puffer which creates
a Tub and a Beehive every cycle.
A few more diagonal spaceships found by Nicolay Beluchenko.
David Bell has constructed a new, compact 5-engine Cordership that contains a releasable sideways glider, and has compiled a series of related results. The pattern at the far right shows a number of ways for the Cordership's northeast edge blocks to be suppressed, allowing the sideways glider to escape.
These new results build on other new Cordership constructions recently -- in particular, a small 3-engine Cordership discovered by Paul Tooke (with the help of Paul Callahan's handy 'gencols' utility) on January 12 of last year. David Bell discovered that it can turn an LWSS 90 degrees, as shown here.
Bell has also produced a series of related Cordership-rake patterns:
A Cordership-based glider-to-backward-LWSS reaction
A 'beehive-puller' Cordership
A p96 forward glider rake
A new smaller p384 'Freeze-Tag' spaceship
A reaction converting two forward gliders to an HWSS
p192 backward HWSS rake
A p96 backward HWSS rake
A p768 backward HWSS rake
A p96 forward LWSS rake
A p96 forward MWSS rake
An alternate p96 forward MWSS rake
A p768 forward LWSS rake
A high-period Cordership-based feedback loop
A wide thin p96 backward rake
A p288 'litterbug' spaceship
A p96 backward LWSS rake
An alternate p96 backward LWSS rake
A p96 backward MWSS rake based on a loaf puffer
A backward LWSS puffer based on an eater/tub-with-tail puffer
Related to this last pattern, he notes that a line of tub-with-tails "can support one side of a switch engine without being modified. Two diagonal lines of them can support one or more switch engines at the ends, and one line can support a 3-engine wing component."
Hartmut Holzwart has found a Lightweight Spaceship convoy which consists of a Period 4 wickstretcher head, a Period 19 wick and a Period 4 fuse. Shown is the simplest version with only one copy of the wick and one with two copies of it. (Note that there are no known Period 19 oscillators, so finding stable ends for this wick may take a while, but it could be the foundation for such an oscillator.)
Jason Summers has found a new diagonal c/5 spaceship. With a population 86 bits in its smallest phase, it becomes the smallest known example for this speed and direction. It is less than one third the size of the next largest example, which has a population 295 bits.
Paul Tooke has found some new c/5 spaceships.
Gabriel Nivasch has announced the construction of a spaceship which travels at the speed of 17c/45. It is based on a "Pi Crawler" reaction, where a Pi Heptomino moves up a string of Blinkers leaving the string undisturbed. This means that multiple Pi Crawlers can use the same string of blinkers, and if multiple tracks are properly positioned, they can interact with each other to act as glider puffers or rakes. These gliders can then be used to create c/2 Orthogonal Spaceships which in turn can run ahead of the Pi Crawlers and lay down the necessary Blinker tracks. For more information on how all this works, see Nivasch's earlier report on the Caterpillar components.
The spaceship itself has a period of 270, and is huge. The dimensions are 4195 cells wide by 330,721 cells deep. Starting with a population of 11,967,399, ranging from 11880063 (gen 113) to 12019156 (gen 210). Nivasch reports that he wrote a program which fitted together 51 different .rle subpatterns that make up the Caterpillar into the final, working pattern. This is the first known spaceship which travels at this speed (0.378c), and the largest object ever actually constructed to date.
Jason Summers has made available a zipped 7.1Meg copy of the .rle file, It has been reported that this .rle file will successfully load and execute with the Life32 program by Johan Bontes, or with Hashlife by Tomas Rokicki. With Life32, just wait a bit for it to load, and be sure to zoom down to a reasonable subsection of the entire pattern, otherwise each generation will take an inordinate amount of time to display. Properly zoomed down, it only takes about a second per generation.
Gabriel Nivasch has updated his web page to provide a 1:40 scale illustration of the entire object.
Harmut Holzwart has found a new 2c/5 spaceship. The red shaded area can be repeated. The lower pattern shows the Order 3 version.
Turns out that this is not a true spaceship, as there is an unsuppressed spark on the trailing edge, that interferes with the spaceship's operation.
In the past few months, Harmut Holzwart has found a number of new 2c/4 and diagonal c/4 spaceships.
