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Timelord Missionary wrote: July 12th, 2026, 4:35 pm He never specified that it had to be a glider, did he? He only wanted a Herschel-to-X, and this fits the criterion entirely, with the Herschel.

No it doesn't: the repeat time is 93 because a spark from Conduit 1 interferes with the next loafer if the timing is any closer

otismo wrote: July 12th, 2026, 1:54 pm Herschel is released in 75 ticks

Glider is released in 96 ticks

That has a repeat time of 93, so almost meets Goldtiger's criterion but not quite.

Why is it being referred to as a 'Simkin ECCA'? It's a construction arm involving a Simkin gun, and it's efficient in terms of the number of input gliders, but it's not an ECCA because the input glider stream isn't an effective compression algorithm: there are many bits of information needed to ...

I think that the main remaining low-hanging fruit is this post by googleplex, where we remove one third of the fuse length: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start=75#p154551

Concretely, we'd launch a northeast glider from the middle of the fuse (where the ignition happens) and ...

So here it is:
795 435 669x1 2c/28 409 785 756:


Very impressive! I've created a wiki page for the new spaceship, https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_2

It's such an enormous improvement over the previous version (almost 5 times smaller by period, population, and bounding box ...

Engineered (28,7)c/448 ((4,1)c/64) spaceship:
28,7c448.mc

Can I see the crawler isolated please?


It's very adjustable by the looks of it: the "crawler" is a block and its "support" is a convoy of xWSSes:

x = 37, y = 126, rule = B3/S23
21b2o$21b2o14$16bo9b3o$15b3o8bo2bo$15bob2o7bo ...

I6_I6 wrote: December 16th, 2025, 10:33 am Should I create a new Wiki article for the new ship or should I edit the one for Unidimensional Spaceship 1?

Neither, since it’s not complete yet!

Awesome work!

It's nice to see heavy Life engineering which closes the gap between theory and practice. Those tiny details when some unexpected interaction happens requiring rework, this optimisation work at various levels instead of plopping the first thing that works... Yeah.


Strongly agreed ...

Hippo.69 wrote: December 2nd, 2025, 10:30 am So finally 2/1330767555768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here:

I can confirm that the pattern works by running it end-to-end, but the period is 133076755768 (you had a typo in your forum post). I'm going to put the verification code in the repository now.

Congratulations!

This is not a bug in simulation ... it is the cordership producing backwards gliders stopping residue.
So the switch far seed has to be modified to consider these gliders as well.


Oh wow; that's a pretty amazing coincidence that those 3 stray gliders don't cause the ECCA2 to completely explode ...

but moving the ECCA2 further from the spine to make room for both colors of arm gliders would be better solution.


If we move the ECCA2 even further northwest (e.g. by thousands of cells) then we have the added benefit that the pattern would run much more quickly in Golly: at the moment things ...

This example infile has blue unknown cells as close as I dared for clearance.


There's no need to guess; you can just run a swimmer track and look at its envelope to determine where you can safely place cells:

x = 60, y = 60, rule = LifeHistory
60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B$60B ...

I'm not sure how computationally expensive it is to apply complicated INT rules like this


Let's define a 3x3 napkin as 'normalised' if the 4 corner cells form one of the following 6 arrangements:

x = 17, y = 10, rule = LifeHistory
CFC4.CFD4.DFD$3F4.3F4.3F$CFC4.CFD4.CFD5$CFC4.CFD4.DFD$3F4.3F4 ...

The update process for syntheses (and smaller guns) has broken again. This time, the issue occurs during 'staging', and always happens shortly after the Google Cloud SDK repository is not found and has to be installed, and this causes the subsequent Shinjuku job to be skipped.

I looked through ...

And here is ECCA1SoD for MWSS destroyed snark (I would prefere more efficient origin transformation, but ... I do not have my laptop ...)


I don't understand why you're pushing the block SE instead of just creating a fresh target on the axis of symmetry? It's much closer to the Snark, and ...

Hippo.69 wrote: October 5th, 2025, 7:20 am OK try it using ECCA2 (correct p2304). You have 2 phases to avoid the glider collision. It would be better to not do it slow2 .
And the final ECCA1 configuration would be known.

How does one program your ECCA2? I think that it has a different instruction encoding compared with my ECCA1.

And here is stopping ECCA1 P256 experiment


That honeyfarm seems to be below the axis of symmetry. I'd just knock out the p256 gun directly on this lane (I'll need to check the timing though):

x = 2958, y = 1657, rule = B3/S23
1688bo$1686b3o$1685bo$1685b2o3$1662b2o4b2o$1662b2o3bo2bo$1668b2o ...

EDIT: actually, even better, we can make the ECCA2 repair its own SOD by using that block as a target.


No, it works perfectly. The block is here because the SoD near bouncer would be in the way of building SoD near ECCA1.
The block is prepared for the SoD construction near the bouncer by ...

Working ECCA2 (and with SoD)


I think that there's a minor mistake: when the arm is in decrementing state (the only state for which the cleanup works), there's still one island that isn't successfully destroyed:

x = 1959, y = 3073, rule = B3/S23
1165b2o$1158b2o6b2o$1157bobo5bo$1159bo61$1101b2o ...

Good news: I've integrated the ECCA2 synthesis into the repository and it is assembled correctly (the position and p8 phase matches exactly, and control switches from the ECCA1 to ECCA2 smoothly). The latest example.mc is attached.

Yes, absolutely. At the moment I'm running example.mc in Golly ...

Good news: I've integrated the ECCA2 synthesis into the repository and it is assembled correctly (the position and p8 phase matches exactly, and control switches from the ECCA1 to ECCA2 smoothly). The latest example.mc is attached.



There's also an unnecessary construction of a boat OTT ...

Hippo.69 wrote: October 4th, 2025, 11:57 am OK I have 11081 gliders salvo: (needs a defragment)

Thanks! I'm defragmenting that now.

There's also an unnecessary construction of a boat OTT reflecting a glider at the end, but that can be solved by making the last glider delete the boat instead.

And the pslmake target had to be Y flipped ... so once again :(
ECCA2CSalvo.mc

And on correct orientation pslmake got stuck on


I'm having more luck (probably slightly different beam search parameters, and the fact that I rotated instead of reflecting):

x = 633014, y = 634092, rule = B3/S23 ...

I'll check the mod-8 glider phase next but I imagine it's okay


I've checked and the phase of the ECCA2 doesn't match the phase of the sample ECCA1 gliders in your pslmake input file; here's the corrected version in the canonical phase mod 8:

x = 2315, y = 2472, rule = LifeHistory
2185.D$2183 ...

Yep I am surprised he boat is the OTT


Why so? Phase is unimportant here, so there's a 50% probability of the colour being correct for a boat (and in this case it is).

You have used the same salvo I was considering yesterday

Yes, I took the salvo from your post! Anyway, I've added the ship ...