ConwayLife.com

Hi,

I'd like to confirm an alternative to 7468M. After 5 generations it merges into the same pattern as the 5th generation of 7468M, but starts of considerably different.

It properties are the same as 7468M:

Bounding Box: 6x4
Initial Population: 8
Generations: 7468

I'm a newbie, and I have downloaded Golly but I can't for the life of me (excuse the pun!) work out how to determine the pattern strings. So I'm going to have to present it to you in two ways that I know:

Pattern ID: 00060004432407 (based on my tool at http://www.co.nz/gameoflife)

Or, here's the pattern drawn: Is there a name for patterns that merge into another known pattern? Sister pattern maybe?

I recall that the 7468M page had a mention in its talk page that there are other 8 cell patterns that last longer... kind of odd that this information is not updated after the comment being there for however long it has.

I suppose you could call such patterns that evolve to the same thing 'co-predecessors'.

edwin wrote:I'm a newbie, and I have downloaded Golly but I can't for the life of me (excuse the pun!) work out how to determine the pattern strings.

If you have the pattern set up in Golly, Edit > Select All (or Ctrl-A) followed by Edit > Copy (or Ctrl-C) will give you the pattern's RLE string in the clipboard. Or you could save the pattern in RLE or MC format, open the resulting file, and copy the text out of that, but that seems like a lot of extra work.

In one of these forum messages, paste the pattern string in from the clipboard, select the text, then click the "Code" button from the message toolbar.