henryz wrote: December 15th, 2019, 9:16 pm
This is definitely already known, right? I looked through the wiki for similar things but found nothing
...
Has every small pattern... already been looked at by search programs?
Depending on your definition of "small" -- probably. Certainly it would be very odd if a 3x3 rotor with a period as low as 4 had not been seen many times by now.
Period-4 patterns are a problem, because they come up so easily in searches and there are so many of them, especially as you go from "small" to "medium sized" (whatever those are exactly)... there hasn't been a concerted effort to keep track of all of the p4 variants that have ever been seen.
However,
jslife is a good start. This one is in the first row, third from the right.
There's also Dean Hickerson's 'dr' (drifter) search program, which has found quite a number of the known higher-period oscillators. It's fairly hopeless to expect that everyone will discover the same stabilizations around the edges of oscillators like these, so it makes sense to not worry about the p1 cells and just focus on the
rotors. There's a file called "knownrotors" that comes with the
'dr' download, but it seems like it's hard to keep it up to date.
One Good Place For Rotors
-- Could someone with a reasonably up-to-date knownrotors file please put a copy in a
knownrotors Wiki page? That way there might be some hope that when people come up with
additions to the knownrotors file, that there will be one obvious central place to put those additions so that other people can find them.