ConwayLife.com

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 10:42 am**

Is it possible to mod Golly and LifeViewer?

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 10:52 am**

I6_I6 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 10:42 am Is it possible to mod Golly and LifeViewer?

Yes, for both (Golly source code, LV source code)

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 1:18 pm**

hotdogPi wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:24 am
NooneAtAll3 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:11 am Is it possible for pseudo still life components to be connected orthogonaly?

It seems that all definitions of strict still life assume by default that islands (polyplets) are indivisible - is there a proof for that?
It is possible.
Code: Select all
x = 10, y = 10, rule = LifeHistory
4.A$2.3A$.A$.A.2A2C$2A.A2.C$3.A2.C.2C$3.2A2C.C$8.C$5.3C$5.C!

Code: Select all

x = 7, y = 4, rule = LifeHistory
3.2C.C$3.C.2C$2A.A$A.2A!

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 8:48 pm**

Can anyone make a website that allows you to search for spaceships using ikpx2 with just a click of a button?

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 8:52 pm**

B468S02357 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:48 pm Can anyone make a website that allows you to search for spaceships using ikpx2 with just a click of a button?

Yes, but I doubt anyone is willing to contribute the compute power required for running searches.
What are you trying to find?

Posted: **September 17th, 2026, 9:31 pm**

B468S02357 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:48 pm Can anyone make a website that allows you to search for spaceships using ikpx2 with just a click of a button?

Using ikpx2? No... but there is rlifesrc: https://alephalpha.github.io/rlifesrc/
You can also follow this guide to set up ikpx2: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Tutorials/ikpx2

Posted: **September 18th, 2026, 12:20 pm**

EvinZL wrote: September 17th, 2026, 1:18 pm
hotdogPi wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:24 am
NooneAtAll3 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:11 am Is it possible for pseudo still life components to be connected orthogonaly?

It seems that all definitions of strict still life assume by default that islands (polyplets) are indivisible - is there a proof for that?
It is possible.
Code: Select all
x = 10, y = 10, rule = LifeHistory
4.A$2.3A$.A$.A.2A2C$2A.A2.C$3.A2.C.2C$3.2A2C.C$8.C$5.3C$5.C!
Code: Select all
x = 7, y = 4, rule = LifeHistory
3.2C.C$3.C.2C$2A.A$A.2A!

My reading of the relevant definitions doesn't allow for the above still lifes to qualify as pseudo still lifes. I can't quite tell if that's the intent of the question, but the part about islands being indivisible seems to hint at that. I'd say rather that islands are maximal -- you can't have two islands touching each other, because then they would be just one island.

Egyptian walk consists of a single island; it's implied in various places (not least by the counts of "strict still life" vs. "pseudo still life") that just because you can partition a strict-still-life island into two smaller strict-still-life islands, doesn't mean that the strict still life becomes a pseudo still life. In other words, an island is a polyplet of live cells that doesn't touch any other live cells horizontally or diagonally.

The examples given in the "island" article make it clear that you can't just chop up islands and count them as more islands. Otherwise the article would say "The boat has either one, two, three, four, or five islands depending on how you partition it" instead of being clear that a boat has exactly one island.

The Egyptian walk article mentions "It can be partitioned into two snakes", but not that that makes it a pseudo still life. You could call it a "pseudo pseudo still life", I suppose, but maybe let's not go there.

Posted: **September 18th, 2026, 12:48 pm**

dvgrn wrote: September 18th, 2026, 12:20 pm
EvinZL wrote: September 17th, 2026, 1:18 pm
hotdogPi wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:24 am ...

It is possible.
Code: Select all
x = 10, y = 10, rule = LifeHistory
4.A$2.3A$.A$.A.2A2C$2A.A2.C$3.A2.C.2C$3.2A2C.C$8.C$5.3C$5.C!
Code: Select all
x = 7, y = 4, rule = LifeHistory
3.2C.C$3.C.2C$2A.A$A.2A!
My reading of the relevant definitions doesn't allow for the above still lifes to qualify as pseudo still lifes. I can't quite tell if that's the intent of the question, but the part about islands being indivisible seems to hint at that. I'd say rather that islands are maximal -- you can't have two islands touching each other, because then they would be just one island.

...

The Egyptian walk article mentions "It can be partitioned into two snakes", but not that that makes it a pseudo still life. You could call it a "pseudo pseudo still life", I suppose, but maybe let's not go there.

If we could, then technically the long barge would be a "pseudo pseudo still life" made from two tubs:

Code: Select all

x = 5, y = 5, rule = LifeHistory
.A$A.A$.A.C$2.C.C$3.C!

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 12:32 am**

dvgrn wrote: September 18th, 2026, 12:20 pm My reading of the relevant definitions doesn't allow for the above still lifes to qualify as pseudo still lifes. I can't quite tell if that's the intent of the question, but the part about islands being indivisible seems to hint at that. I'd say rather that islands are maximal -- you can't have two islands touching each other, because then they would be just one island.

Egyptian walk consists of a single island; it's implied in various places (not least by the counts of "strict still life" vs. "pseudo still life") that just because you can partition a strict-still-life island into two smaller strict-still-life islands, doesn't mean that the strict still life becomes a pseudo still life. In other words, an island is a polyplet of live cells that doesn't touch any other live cells horizontally or diagonally.

The examples given in the "island" article make it clear that you can't just chop up islands and count them as more islands. Otherwise the article would say "The boat has either one, two, three, four, or five islands depending on how you partition it" instead of being clear that a boat has exactly one island.

The Egyptian walk article mentions "It can be partitioned into two snakes", but not that that makes it a pseudo still life. You could call it a "pseudo pseudo still life", I suppose, but maybe let's not go there.

I guess I should start with pointing out that all definitions are just made up words
definitions are notation-and-idea shortcuts, made to be convenient, aligned as close as possible to intuition, while still staying within rigor
and depending from which direction you approach an already-established definition, your intuition can happen to be more or less aligned with it

you're totally justified in starting from the definition of an island as "king-move-connected cell group" and then applying that to a pseudo-still lives

But consider the opposite situation - I just spent hour or two at that point parsing and understanding Cook's Still Life Theory paper all about the question "Here, you now have a giant still life. Can you separate it into several distinct components?"

de facto the definition of pseudo-still life is equivalent to 3 requirements on such components:
1) component must include all orthogonally adjacent cells to it
2) component must include all diagonally adjacent cells to it, and
3) component must still stay a still life
(you may recognize the first two as originating from definition of an island while the third jumps-connects between islands)

And the deal is that the proofs in the paper (due to using very basic shapes) come tantalizingly close to only using requirement 3 - they never use the requirement 1, and only ever use requirement 2 in the "trivial" easily missable part of connecting the wires
While at the same time everything gets muddled by the use of its own, stronger, version of separating the "seas" (sets of orthogonally connected dead cells), moving what was but no longer is exactly equivalent to requirements 1 and 2 from definitions into proof techniques

My intuition never even came up with requirement 2, and I operated on a set of 1+3.
At which point, looking at requirement 1 not being used at all, the logical question became "but do we actually need it?"

So, coming from the direction of "separate pseudo still life" task, ask yourself - what's the need for defining the island and limiting separations to only whole-island solutions?
To me, the answer seems to be
1)it's aesthetically more pleasing and
2)it's straight up easier not to deal with it, because detecting separable islands by eye is haaard

---

Anyway, I think I came up with all the needed pieces needed to remove dependency on everything other than "all components are still still lives" and will write an improvement (and digestion) for the "still life 3+ coloring is NP-C" proof into the linked thread ...after I get some sleep

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 2:59 am**

How do I check who found a specific pattern first on catagolue?
EDIT: how come hauls aren't verified for B3/S2?

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 4:54 am**

NNlk05 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:52 pm
B468S02357 wrote: September 17th, 2026, 8:48 pm what I said
Yes, but I doubt anyone is willing to contribute the compute power required for running searches.
What are you trying to find?

Indeed, my nemesis, I must find the elementary camelship. Another proposed possibility I would like to see is a c/8o or c/9o ship very much indeed.

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 7:37 am**

NooneAtAll3 wrote: September 19th, 2026, 12:32 am I guess I should start with pointing out that all definitions are just made up words...

Absolutely. You've come across an alternate way of partitioning large still lifes into smaller still lifes, different from the one that's mandated by "strict still life" / "pseudo still life" / "quasi still life" definitions.

Mostly I just posted to try to point out that a new made-up word would be needed for the category that you found -- something along the lines of "pseudo pseudo still life", but maybe just "partitionable still life" would be better -- because existing made-up words don't fit.

Sometimes the partition is very intuitive, and it seems like there ought to be a category for still lifes like that -- e.g., boat-tie or ship-tie where the connection is diagonal and the partitions are easy to recognize.

But sometimes the partition is extraordinarily subtle. hotdogPi's example dissecting a supported 4x4 hollow square into two supported tables is probably only the tip of the iceberg; once a still life gets big enough it will become quite difficult to decide (in practice, without impractical exhaustive enumerations) whether it is partitionable or not.

I'm guessing there will turn out to be something analogous to the triple pseudo still life and quad pseudo still life: are there still-life islands that can be partitioned into three or more still-life islands, but not into just two?

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 10:36 am**

B468S02357 wrote: September 19th, 2026, 4:54 am Indeed, my nemesis, I must find the elementary camelship. Another proposed possibility I would like to see is a c/8o or c/9o ship very much indeed.

I'm afraid that you likely won't find those unless you have a supercomputer. Hundreds of thousands of CPU hours have been poured into new speeds in b3/s23, and you would be treading on ground so trodden on before that by now it's mud.

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 2:23 pm**

LuveelVoom wrote: September 19th, 2026, 10:36 am I'm afraid that you likely won't find those unless you have a supercomputer. Hundreds of thousands of CPU hours have been poured into new speeds in b3/s23, and you would be treading on ground so trodden on before that by now it's mud.

This and B468's idea of a website-based ikpx2 is giving me the idea of a collaborative spaceship searching project, where the computing power is accumulated from contributors, akin to GIMPS. However, I couldn't and wouldn't set up something like that, and I can already think of a few loose ends:

Which spaceship speed(s) would be available to contribute in the search?

Which search program would be used?

How would the search program even be set up?

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 3:00 pm**

TheWayOfTheCon wrote: September 19th, 2026, 2:23 pm
LuveelVoom wrote: September 19th, 2026, 10:36 am I'm afraid that you likely won't find those unless you have a supercomputer. Hundreds of thousands of CPU hours have been poured into new speeds in b3/s23, and you would be treading on ground so trodden on before that by now it's mud.
This and B468's idea of a website-based ikpx2 is giving me the idea of a collaborative spaceship searching project, where the computing power is accumulated from contributors, akin to GIMPS. However, I couldn't and wouldn't set up something like that, and I can already think of a few loose ends:

Which spaceship speed(s) would be available to contribute in the search?

Which search program would be used?

How would the search program even be set up?

This has in fact been done before, with c/8o:
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/User:Sokwe/C/8-width-19

In my opinion, the best searches to do would be:
Finding a new (2,1)c/6
Finding a new c/8d
Finding any Xc/8o

Posted: **September 19th, 2026, 11:24 pm**

Chris857 wrote: September 19th, 2026, 11:00 pm
MathAndCode wrote: September 19th, 2026, 2:07 pm Also, is it just me, or is Catagolue not updating with these syntheses?
https://gitlab.com/hatsya/open-source/c ... kind=BUILD
Job's been failing for like a month.

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic ... 35#p234335

This backlog is becoming a problem. Who manages Catagolue and could solve the issue?

EDIT:

Disaster16439 wrote: September 21st, 2026, 10:45 pm Known? (LWSS (some direction) rake), quite trivial:
Code: Select all

I mean, the exact LWSS rake feature is already featured in the minimal solifuge design already

Posted: **September 23rd, 2026, 4:17 am**

To disprove the existence of a p3 with <=n cells, say 14 cells, in a rule that is similar to CGoL (specifically rules in the rulespace B3/S2 - B35678/S235678), what is the minimum bounding box I would need for a search to disprove it?
EDIT: I know that at some point in the evolution the 2 edge rows need to have at least 3 cells in them, because a cell on the very edge needs 2 neighbors survive, and if it doesn't survive then you need 3 cells to make it be born again, and if neither of these happen then it cannot touch the edge. So that rules off 3 cells. On the other edge, the timings don't have to align, but if there are 0 cells in the last 2 rows then there would be 5 in the 3rd row, which is inefficient, and if there's 1 then there has to be at least 3 other cells in those 3 rows. This means the best scenario would be having them both at the same time. This leaves just 8 cells, and in the variant that is probably most likely to work, it looks like this:

Code: Select all

x = 14, y = 8, rule = LifeHistory
2D10.2D$2D10.2D$DC10.CD$DC10.CD$DC10.CD$2D10.2D$2D10.2D$2D10.2D!

Now I just have to figure out how far apart we can put those cells.
EDIT 2: this is the longest I could find, so I think this is the width (16 cells):

Code: Select all

x = 16, y = 8, rule = LifeHistory
2D12.2D$2D12.2D$2D3.A.2A.A3.2D$DC3.A4.A3.CD$DC.A8.A.CD$DC12.CD$2D12.2D
$2D12.2D!

Next is to figure out how big the largest square I can make is.
EDIT 3: Probably just this (11 cells):

Code: Select all

x = 11, y = 11, rule = LifeHistory
9.2A$10.A$9.A$8.A$7.A$6.A$5.A$4.A$3.A$A.A$2A!

So, the search will be 16x11.

Posted: **September 25th, 2026, 12:42 am**

Code: Select all

x = 21, y = 21, rule = B3/S23|B345678/S23
10bo$10bo$9b3o$10bo$10bo2$10bo$9b3o$8b5o$2bo4b2o3b2o4bo$5ob3o3b3ob5o$
2bo4b2o3b2o4bo$8b5o$9b3o$10bo2$10bo$10bo$9b3o$10bo$10bo!

What is the name of a rule that has a "|" symbol like this?

Posted: **September 25th, 2026, 12:50 am**

Wngks Life wrote: September 25th, 2026, 12:42 am
Code: Select all
x = 21, y = 21, rule = B3/S23|B345678/S23
10bo$10bo$9b3o$10bo$10bo2$10bo$9b3o$8b5o$2bo4b2o3b2o4bo$5ob3o3b3ob5o$
2bo4b2o3b2o4bo$8b5o$9b3o$10bo2$10bo$10bo$9b3o$10bo$10bo!
What is the name of a rule that has a "|" symbol like this?

Alternating rules.

Posted: **September 26th, 2026, 12:51 pm**

I saw some others have urls in their signature, and I was wondering if I could change what the display looks like, instead of having it just be the url. (example is my signature)
Is there a way to do this?

Posted: **September 26th, 2026, 12:52 pm**

parkes24 wrote: September 26th, 2026, 12:51 pm I saw some others have urls in their signature, and I was wondering if I could change what the display looks like, instead of having it just be the url. (example is my signature)
Is there a way to do this?

NNlk05's site

Code: Select all

[url=https://nnlk05.github.io]NNlk05's site[/url]

Posted: **October 5th, 2026, 6:42 am**

Sokwe wrote: September 19th, 2025, 4:26 pm
I6_I6 wrote: September 19th, 2025, 11:52 am I downloaded jslife, but I don't know how to open .lif files. Can someone help?
You can open .lif files directly in Golly.

I also just downloaded jslife and have Golly, but I can't seem to open the .lif files in Golly. Maybe it's because I'm using a phone. How would I import all the files from jslife into Golly easily?

Posted: **October 5th, 2026, 8:07 am**

8than888 wrote: October 5th, 2026, 6:42 am
Sokwe wrote: September 19th, 2025, 4:26 pm
I6_I6 wrote: September 19th, 2025, 11:52 am I downloaded jslife, but I don't know how to open .lif files. Can someone help?
You can open .lif files directly in Golly.
I also just downloaded jslife and have Golly, but I can't seem to open the .lif files in Golly. Maybe it's because I'm using a phone. How would I import all the files from jslife into Golly easily?

.lif files are plaintext. While I haven't tried itself, I imagine changing the extension to .txt should work.

Posted: **October 6th, 2026, 1:24 am**

What happened to wwei23? And how is Aleph a moderator? And why is the "Last active" status on their account empty?
Edit: AforAmpere is a moderator too now??? I'm confused.

Posted: **October 6th, 2026, 2:14 am**

I6_I6 wrote: October 6th, 2026, 1:24 am What happened to wwei23? […]

What happened to wwei23?

As for AforAmpere and Aleph, I found some info on Discord:

NNlk05 wrote: wait ampre [sic] is mod now too???
we may want to promote some older mods to admin and recute [sic] come [sic] newer mods

hotdogPi wrote: It was my idea. I didn't want to say it at the time because people might get the idea "oh everyone is offline", but Dave Greene was recently on vacation, leaving me as the only active moderator.

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