ConwayLife.com

For clarification, you launch the blinker puffer followed by the *WSS recipe (which would collide with the block, when it comes into existence, to construct the copy of the Geminoid). Then, whilst that's travelling away at c/2, you construct a bomb (p256 gun attached to a bunch of semisnarks ...

Somebody in the conwaylife community is probably only a couple of handshakes away from somebody on the AlphaZero team. I'd love to see what a few weeks of DeepMind focus on glider synthesis or spaceship search problems might come up with.


I'm probably only 2-3 handshakes away from someone on ...

Yup, that's exactly the trade-off. And you're absolutely right that there are likely to be universal constructor designs that can replicate themselves significantly faster, by building more complicated circuitry. Not sure that building *WSS hammer reactions is going to be one of those designs, but ...

Better universal XWSS construction
Was this referring to the single-channel (or similar)->slow salvo stage, the slow-salvo->object stage, or both?
Each is very inefficient, but I suspect that improving single-channel construction would be more useful.


Could someone give links to good ...

I guess it depends on whether you're trying to optimize construction rate, or simplicity of building the constructor. A more capable constructor can presumably build itself faster, which may or may not sufficiently compensate for it being inherently more complex. Overall, we're probably most often ...

That's not to say that someday we might not have a backtracking search algorithm that generates predecessors, and recursively chooses predecessors that are more amenable to being constructed by gliders -- maybe they contain large simple stable regions, or maybe the search will prefer predecessors ...

Given the 'hammer' conversion of a MWSS to a LWSS, you might also want to look at mixed MWSS/LWSS salvos. Or, given a triggered HWSS gun and two triggered hammer conversions, even a full 3-type *WSS mixed salvo. Not sure what the repetition rate limits on those would be.

Another potential ...

A small 4c/8 beehive puffer that I'm not finding prior art for (crossposted from the Discord): x = 20, y = 34, rule = B3/S23
17bo$16b3o$2b3o3b3o5bob2o$2bo2bobo2bo6b3o$2bo7bo6b2o$2bo7bo$3bobo4bo3b
o$6bo3bo2b3o$10bo5bo$7bobo$14bo$14b3o$bo12bo$3o3b3o5bo$ob2o2bo2bo$b3o
2bo6b2o$b3o2bo3bo2b2o ...