1-Dimensional Patterns

[M. I. Wright]

Following Wojowu's post here, a nontrivial unidimensional pattern that evolves into another.

Code: Select all

x = 77, y = 1, rule = B3/S23
11ob4o2b4ob3o6b6ob3o2b9ob3ob3o7b5ob3o!
[[ STOP 128 ]]

I spent about a week searching for this purposefully, by way of near-brute force, after figuring out how to make some VERY amateur modifications to bgolly and a pair of similarly amateur C++ "search" programs: one to find an inward-bound glider pair generator (right), and the other to find an appropriately-timed blinker edge-shooter (left). This final result, however, came about by virtue of sheer dumb luck (and a frantic few minutes of manual fiddling in Golly), and as such I'm sure there's a more optimized solution to be found if one were interested enough to properly search for it.

Necroing (sorry) to point out that the TL-sabotage contraption on the right that spits out an opposite-parity blinker is unnecessary, and you can just use a same-parity blinker in a different position:

Code: Select all

x = 77, y = 1, rule = B3/S23
11ob4o2b4ob3o6b6ob3o2b9ob3ob3o7b3o!
[[ STOP 128 ]]

Like I said in the quoted post, this pattern is made of three independent parts: a blinker edge-shooter (leftmost four runs of ON cells), a dirty glider generator that leaves a blinker as debris (next five runs of ON cells), and something to suppress that blinker (remaining ON cells). Either one of the first two components could be optimized independently.

For posterity, I seem to remember that the "sheer dumb luck" I mentioned was that I found the glider generator myself by naively manually modifying a bad result from the search program I had made, and the "frantic few minutes of manual fiddling" were from trying to find a way to clear the debris (the result of which was the contraption originally on the right of the pattern to spit out that opposite-parity blinker). I don't remember what the manual modification was anymore -- what's in my memory is that I deleted a cell at the right, and indeed if you add that cell back you get a subpar glider generator with a lot of debris, but I have no idea if I'm remembering right. Who knows

[I6_I6]

Sorry for the sort-of necropost.
The unidimensional spaceship is finally complete!