(April Fools) Lifeline #12 FOUND!

[Sokwe]

Edit: this was an elaborate April Fools prank. More details are given here. I hope you enjoyed it. The original message follows:

After over 50 years, someone has finally found the missing Lifeline #12! I got an email from someone who apparently found this among other unrelated papers while cleaning out an old storage locker. I asked for more details, but I haven't heard back yet, and of course I couldn't wait to share this important piece of Life history with the community. All 12 pages of Lifeline #12 are attached below as I received them.

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[WhiteHawk]

(That's weird. I didn't intentionally doublepost, but when I pressed submit on my response I received the page saying a new post had been made and saw this post. This may be a bug that needs to be fixed)

EDIT by dvgrn: This happens to other people too, including me, but very rarely and not reproducibly. One likely explanation is a "mouse click bounce", where the browser for whatever reason ends up receiving a mouse click twice in quick succession. If so, it's more of a hardware glitch than a bug -- not really fixable, but easy to recognize and clean up after.

[WhiteHawk]

After over 50 years, someone has finally found the missing Lifeline #12!

Awesome!

Does this finally answer the mystery surrounding corderman's unknown deconimo actually being the nonomino we thought it was all along?

EDIT: It would have been fun if "mayfly" had caught on for what we call phoenixes.

[Sokwe]

Does this answer the mystery surrounding corderman's deconimo actually being the nonomino we thought all along?

Nothing in this is from Corderman. Hugh W. Thompson had run all of the nonominoes by Lifeline #11 (noted on page 1), so this actually would be a known result from there. I doubt we'll ever have definitive evidence on whether Corderman was exploring nonominoes or decominoes when he found the switch engine.

[WhiteHawk]

Nothing in this is from Corderman. Hugh W. Thompson had run all of the nonominoes by Lifeline #11 (noted on page 1), so this actually would be a known result from there. I doubt we'll ever have definitive evidence on whether Corderman was exploring nonominoes or decominoes when he found the switch engine.

Drat.

Anyways, what important discoveries does this copy of this missing Lifeline issue cover?

[hkoenig]

Someone put a rather lot of effort into this.

[Aleph]

Answer honestly. Is this an April Fools joke or not?

[Sokwe]

Someone put a rather lot of effort into this.

Yes, Robert Wainwright did put a lot of effort into the Lifeline newsletter.

Answer honestly. Is this an April Fools joke or not?

Are you suggesting that someone would go through the effort of painstakingly typesetting a document to look like a typewritten Lifeline newsletter, complete with articles that could have plausibly been written at the time, all for a silly prank? Imagine how much effort that would take. That person would have to be crazy!

If it's a prank, then the prankster has a decent knowledge of the history of Life, an impressive attention to detail, and apparently nothing better to do with their free time, but perhaps something in the document reveals it.

[hotcrystal0]

"So far, all known mayflies have a period of 2."
Little did they know, in 2024 a proof would turn up that all finite "mayflies" have period 2.

[confocaloid]

Page 11 says:

[...]
On re 2, Foreman's F drops from its initial size of 24 down to 16,
while Ali's A expands from 20 to 29! [...]

The number 20 appears to be an error: the initial population of 'A' in the figure is 18.

Code: Select all

x = 18, y = 8, rule = B3/S23
5o10bo$5o9bobo$2o11bo3bo$2o11bo3bo$4o9b5o$2o11bo3bo$2o11bo3bo$2o11bo3bo!
#C [[ GRID THEME Inverse ]]

[Sokwe]

"So far, all known mayflies have a period of 2."
Little did they know, in 2024 a proof would turn up that all finite "mayflies" have period 2.

Ah, but Pratt did have a proof that there are no odd-period mayflies, something not otherwise known until 2024. What was this proof? Maybe we'll get to see it if somebody ever finds a copy of Lifeline #13.

The number 20 appears to be an error: the initial population of 'A' in the figure is 18.

Thanks. It's always good to collect mistakes for the Lifeline errata page.

Anyways, what important discoveries does this copy of this missing Lifeline issue cover?

The most impressive discoveries mentioned are probably the proof that there are no odd-period mayflies (forgotten and not proven again until 2024), or the use of Life to predict not only Ali's victory over Foreman in the "Rumble in the Jungle", but also Foreman's boxing comeback at a much older age.

[confocaloid]

(overlaps with the above post by Sokwe)

It's interesting that the page 12 says

[...]
So far, all known mayflies
have a period of 2. Pratt
has provided a 14-page hand-
written document containing
an extremely clever proof
that no mayfly can have an
odd period. Regrettably,
I have not yet had time to
rewrite this proof in a for-
mat suitable for Lifeline,
but you can rest assured
that it will be the feature
article of Lifeline #13.
Higher even-period mayflies
might exist similar to those
found in 3-4 Life. (#11 p.15)

That would mean that there was a written attempt at a proof that there are no odd-period phoenices, at some time before April 1974. (Of course there could be errors, preventing it from being a proof.) It sounds like the margin on the last pages of Lifeline Volume 12 would be too narrow to contain it. It could not rely on modern SAT solvers. It would be interesting to see what it was.

Available sources (and the wiki entry Phoenix) don't seem to mention it. The forum search and the wiki search don't seem to return any relevant results about the author.

All known finite phoenices have period 2, and Stephen Silver proved in 2000 that there cannot exist a finite phoenix of period 3. Alex Greason more recently proved the non-existence of any phoenix (finite or infinite) with period 3 or 5.
[...]
It seemed as though a finite period-4 phoenix may have been possible, as Keith Amling found period-4 wicks consisting of a narrow flexible rope supported by finite period-2 supports:
[...]

[Sokwe]

The forum search and the wiki search don't seem to return any relevant results about the author.

Indeed, who is this mysterious April Pratt? That's an interesting name.

[LaundryPizza03]

For the c/3 diagonal spaceship in 3-4 Life, the previous earliest known report was from Scott Dershellik in 1988. New Gliders DB will need to be updated. I'm not sure what name to place alongside it; the name "jellyfish" is already in use for the c/7d in B3/S245, while Eisenmann's and Niemiec's websites call it the "diagonal glider".

[Sokwe]

April Fools!

Yes, I did in fact construct this fake issue of Lifeline. I hope you all enjoyed reading it, and maybe also enjoyed being fooled by it, if even for a brief moment. I put a lot of work into various details like plausible explanations for who discovered what, when, and how, and the exact formatting of each of the reader reply letters to more-or-less match those present in earlier Lifeline issues. For example, Dean Hickerson had a 12-pitch typewriter, instead of the standard 10-pitch, so I reduced the font size while maintaining the line height in order to mimic that effect, as I couldn't find a 12-pitch typewriter font online.

Some of the details are made up, and it would be difficult at this point to untangle the truth from the fiction. The things I think are the biggest tells that its fake are page 11, which eerily accurately predicts the boxing futures of Ali and Foreman, and page 12, where "April Pratt" has a proof of no odd-period "mayflies" (phoenixes) that this Lifeline was too small to contain. The reason for the name "April Pratt" is that at least one proposal for the meaning of the name "Pratt" is from an old English word meaning "trickster" (another proposal is from a word meaning "meadow").

I have attached a zip archive containing the pdf of the fake Lifeline #12. It was created entirely with XeLaTeX and the use of some fonts to sort of match what was being used in the original Lifeline. The XeLaTeX source is a bit of a mess, so I'm not prepared to share it at the moment, but I might clean it up a little bit so that I can share it if anyone is interested. One thing I want to try is to make an accurate, clean recreation of Lifeline #1 using the same tricks.

If anyone wants to know any more details about this project, feel free to ask. If you got fooled, I hope you find entertainment in that fact. I personally think the greatest honor on April Fools' Day is to be fooled, and I hope my effort to make this seem plausible could afford you that honor.

Edit: the part I'm most proud of is the invention of the term "mayfly" to replace "phoenix". I'm usually not great at naming things, but I thought that name was pretty good. I didn't want to use "phoenix", because that name wasn't in use at the time, and I thought a different name might make it seem like it came from an earlier era in Life exploration.

[islptng]

Answer honestly. Is this an April Fools joke or not?

Are you suggesting that someone would go through the effort of painstakingly typesetting a document to look like a typewritten Lifeline newsletter, complete with articles that could have plausibly been written at the time, all for a silly prank? Imagine how much effort that would take. That person would have to be crazy!

If it's a prank, then the prankster has a decent knowledge of the history of Life, an impressive attention to detail, and apparently nothing better to do with their free time, but perhaps something in the document reveals it.

ConwayLife moderators do have a decent knowledge of the history of Life and an impressive attention to detail, and creating that thing won't take much time.

I didn't discover that the texture of the paper doesn't look like the ones from 1970s, page 1's font differs from page 2's, and the name "April Pratt" until today. I got fooled too, and I enjoyed it!

E:DIT:

What a tricky reply -- you didn't tell any lie!

E:DIT 2: hello, otismo

This is Not an April's Fool --

This is A r t!

[Sokwe]

I didn't discover that the texture of the paper doesn't look like the ones from 1970s

The worst part about this is I genuinely, no joke, have a ream of blank paper from the 1970s, and I forgot to use it.

page 1's font differs from page 2's, and the name "April Pratt" until today. I got fooled too, and I enjoyed it!

This is actually part of the illusion to make it look more authentic. If you take a look at the scans of Lifeline #11, you'll see that each section uses a different typeface, because they are photocopies of articles submitted by various readers. The first page of Lifeline #11 (written by Wainwright) was clearly typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter using the Courier typeface with a very new typeball (so the text was very clean). To mimic this, I used Courier for the two pages of Lifeline #12 supposedly written by Wainwright, the first and last, as well as all of the headers and editor notes (marked by "EN:").

Most Lifeline readers were using one of the various 10-pitch (10 characters per inch) "Pica" typefaces on a wide variety of typewriters with a varying level of wear. To mimic this, I used this neat font which adds blotchiness to the characters and sort of cycles through 9 different glyphs for each letter to add randomness that mimics the variability of old typewriters. Another issue mentioned above was that Dean Hickerson had a 12-pitch typewriter, as opposed to the much more common 10-pitch typewriter, so I basically had to reduce the font size to 10-point and increase the line height to compensate, since I couldn't find an actual 12-pitch typewriter font online.

creating that thing won't take much time.

It actually did take quite a bit of time. I had to figure out how to typeset the document correctly, look through old Lifelines to match up things like typefaces and pattern display styles (grid/no grid, dots or circles for cells, cell spacing, etc.) for each author, read a bunch of history to know both who discovered what, when and to know what somebody could have plausibly discovered (such as Dean Hickerson "discovering" a c/3 diagonal ship in 3-4 Life by adding two cells to an oscillator he had previously found). Then I had to actually write the content and typeset the whole thing. I've been working on it off-and-on for about two months, although most of the actual article writing was done in the last week.

This is A r t!