:qd Abbreviation for quarter diagonal.
:Q-pentomino Conway's name for the following pentomino, a traffic light predecessor.
OOOO ...O |
:quad (p2) Found by Robert Kraus, April 1971. Of all oscillators that fit in a 6x6 box this is the only flipper.
OO..OO O..O.O .O.... ....O. O.O..O OO..OO |
:QuadLife A form of colourised Life in which there are four types of ON cell. A newly-born cell takes the type of the majority of its three parent cells, or the remaining type if its parent cells are all of different types. In areas where there are only two types of ON cell QuadLife reduces to Immigration.
:quadpole (p2) The barberpole of length 4.
OO..... O.O.... ....... ..O.O.. ....... ....O.O .....OO |
:quadratic filter A toolkit developed by Dean Hickerson and Gabriel Nivasch in 2006, enabling the construction of patterns with asymptotic population growth matching an infinite number of different sublinear functions -- namely, O(t(1/2n)) for any chosen n. See also exponential filter, recursive filter.
:quadratic growth The fastest possible asymptotic rate of population growth for any Life pattern -- O(t2) in big-O notation, where t is the number of ticks. The first quadratic-growth pattern found was Bill Gosper's breeder, in 1971; many other types of breeders and spacefillers have been constructed since.
In April 2011, Stephen Silver gave an example of a one-cell-thick pattern over a million cells long that exhibited quadratic growth. In November 2014, Chris Cain constructed a one-cell-thick pattern with a reduced bounding box of 7242x1.
There are an infinite number of possible growth rates for Life patterns, between linear and quadratic growth -- see superlinear growth.
:quadratic replicator A pattern that fills all or part of the Life plane by making copies of itself in a nonlinear way. Small quadratic replicators are known in other Life-like rules, but as of January 2016 no example has been found or constructed in Conway's Life.
:quadratic sawtooth Any sawtooth pattern with a quadratic envelope, or specifically a pattern assembled by Martin Grant in May 2015, consisting of two caber tossers with period multipliers for timing which activate and deactivate two toggle rake guns. The gliders emitted by those rakes annihilate on the diagonal while the rakes are eaten by 2c/5 ships. All the rakes and gliders are destroyed before the next cycle. See also Osqrtlogt.
:quarter (c/4 diagonally, p4) The following spaceship, found by Jason Summers in September 2000. The name is due to the 25-cell minimum population. This is the smallest known c/4 spaceship other than the glider. This spaceship can also be used to make the smallest known tubstretcher.
........OO... .......OO.... .........O... ...........OO ..........O.. ............. .........O..O .OO.....OO... OO.....O..... ..O....O.O... ....OO..O.... ....OO....... |
:quarter diagonal A unit of measurement sometimes used for diagonal distances, especially for slow salvo glider lanes. One advantage of measurement in quarter diagonals is that gliders travel diagonally at 1qd/tick, so that the same integer value can serve as either a time or a diagonal distance measurement.
:quasar (p3) Found by Robert Wainwright, August 1971. See pulsar.
:queen bee See queen bee shuttle.
:queen bee shuttle (p30) Found by Bill Gosper in 1970. There are a number of ways to stabilize the ends. Gosper originally stabilized shuttles against one another in a square of eight shuttles. Two simpler methods are shown here; for a third see buckaroo. The queen bee shuttle is the basis of all known true p30 guns (see Gosper glider gun).
:Quetzal Dieter Leithner's name for the true p54 glider gun he built in January 1998. (This is short for Quetzalcoatlus and expresses the fact that the gun was a very large Herschel loop that was not an emu.) Shortly afterwards Leithner also built a p56 Quetzal using a mechanism found by Noam Elkies for this purpose. In October 1998 Stephen Silver constructed a p55 Quetzal using Elkies' p5 reflector of the previous month.
Some of the more recent Quetzals are not Herschel loops, but are instead short Herschel tracks firing several glider streams all but one of which is reflected back to the beginning of the track to create a new Herschel. Noam Elkies first had the idea of doing this for the p55 case, and Stephen Silver constructed the resulting gun shortly after building the original (much larger) p55 Quetzal. Jason Summers later built a p54 version, which is more complicated because the evenness of the period makes the timing problems considerably more difficult.
:Quetzalcoatlus A giant flying dinosaur after which Dieter Leithner named his p54 gun. Usually abbreviated to Quetzal, or simply Q (as in Q54, Q55, Q56, Q-gun, etc.).
:quilt = squaredance