Build a Gustavo's Reverse Caber Tosser

[Hunting]

In Gustavo's imaginary RCT design, the information is encoded in the distance between gliders. To be honest, this idea also came to my mind when I first heard of RCT. How about actually building it?

[dvgrn]

In Gustavo's imaginary RCT design, the information is encoded in the distance between gliders. To be honest, this idea also came to my mind when I first heard of RCT. How about actually building it?

It's not a terribly difficult task, as long as you don't get hung up on trying to optimize it so it can be built with the absolute minimum number of gliders.

For example, build the simplest possible Spartan structure that counts in binary, putting the results in a binary tape register like the ones in the pi and phi calculator patterns.

Arrange it so that when a glider comes in from far far far away and enters a "BUILD NOW!" circuit, the structure will stop counting, and will start interpreting the current binary string on the tape as a series of PUSH, PULL, and FIRE instructions fed to a universal construction arm.

When the binary tape has erased all of its data and gets back to zero position, the tape reader self-destructs, leaving just whatever structure has been built by the construction arm.

There's literally no unknown technology in that design, so it would just be a matter of putting something together. Or you could adapt chris_c's trinary storage design from 2015, which was the immediate predecessor of this whole RCT idea.