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testitemqlstudop wrote:and gfind told me that was an puffer.
The puffer detection in gfind is very trigger happy. It will report all patterns that successfully manage to reproduce the candidate pattern after one period (or something like that - I'm a bit hazy on the details). It does that so that it is able to report any pattern which is potentially a puffer engine. Most of these candidate patterns subsequently fall apart when the smoke at the back interferes with the engine itself. I believe this preliminary puffer detection code was implemented like this because it is simple, and allows puffers with much higher period to be found without having to run gfind at that much higher period. This is essentially required to allow gfind to run in some reasonable time, especially for slower engines which can only support puffers of much larger period than gfind is able to handle.
To get any useful output from the puffer detection, run gfind with hashing disabled, i.e. use '/h0' (so that incorrectly detected candidates won't be discarded from the search) and tell it to output a large number of results, e.g. '/f1000'. Redirect the output to a file and you will then need to post-process the results to find out if any of those candidate patterns stabilise into an actual puffer. I've not used this option successfully, but I can say that you should expect the success rate to be very low.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.
Semi-active here - recovering from a severe case of LWTDS.
Very interesting pattern that could hint at an oblique spaceship!!! Obviously, probably not in life, but some related rule. Just look at the evolution in normal CGoL:
