Patterns Too Big for the Applet

A powerful enough Game of Life applet has simply not been written yet that can display these patterns in a web browser. My applet is pretty powerful, but it has its limits. These patterns can all be run with Golly. Golly is a desktop app that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. There are many more patterns that don't run acceptably in my applet, but these are the ones I wish I could include:

It has long been known that it is possible to construct a Turing machine in Conway's game of Life, but that it would be large and difficult. On March 2, 2000, Paul Rendell announced that he had built one. Here it is at a scale of 4 to 1:


Quadratic growth starting with the smallest number of cells: The record currently stands at 26, set by Nick Gotts on March 17, 2006, with a pattern called Wedge Grow, which uses switch engines to produce switch engines. Here is a screen capture of it as it just starts to generate its third new switch engine, down and to the left, at generation 862,804 and population 493,464, at a scale of 256 to 1:


"Caterpillar", a spaceship made out of pi heptominoes, was constructed by Gabriel Nivasch on December 31, 2004. Its speed is highly unusual for a Life spaceship: 17c/45. It is also unusually large: 4195 cells wide, and 330721 cells long, with a population of around 12 million live cells. If you have a really fast computer, and a really fast Life program, you might be able to view it. Golly can barely cope with it. Download the Caterpillar (warning: very large zip file!)


Broken Lines is just a simple pattern of colliding gliders and spaceships, created by Dean Hickerson in May 2005.


And here is what it looks like at the 67,214,767th generation, zoomed out at a scale of 16384 to 1:
Whoa.


The idea of a Unit Cell is to create a metapixel: a square pattern that has two states, on or off, and it changes to a new state based on its current state, and the state of neighboring metapixels—Life running in Life! A single, very basic 500x500 unit cell, called "UnitCell", is actually shown in my applet, but what good is a single Life cell all by itself? In late 2005 to early 2006, Brice Due created a new kind of unit cell that use spaceship guns to create visibly obvious cell states from a zoomed-out perspective (which unfortunately expands the size of the cell to 2048x2048). And then he put them together, and with the power of Golly, was able to construct oscillators, such as this Meta-Galaxy, as seen at a scale of 64 to 1: