Patterns Too Big for the Applet
- 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.
- The smallest initial population for a quadratic
(O(n2)) growth pattern is
"metacatacryst",
found by Nick Gotts on December 23, 2000. It has only 52
cells, but is so sparse that at the start that its bounding
box is 59739x14663. Its growth is so erratic that it took
some time to become reasonably certain that it is, in fact,
quadratic. It is unknown what the smallest quadratic
growth pattern is, but this is probably not the last word
on the subject.
- "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.
The
Caterpillar itself (warning: large zip file)