ConwayLife.com

It looks like it has been a great year for OCAs.
Just to confirm, I might be on-and-off from the 5th to the 13th-ish due to exams at university, I'll try to keep it all up to date and updated after that.
Nominations open. EDIT: merged into discovery of the year because many examples overlap in between being a rule or a pattern (i.e. rules designed for specific patterns or patterns found in rules that don't really count as proper "engineered" patterns and are more down to the rule being weird)


OCA Discovery of the Year 2017

• The families of adjustable speed spaceships for odd or even denominators.
• The discovery of SMOSMOS as a category with many examples.
• The gargantuan task of classifying all known speeds in isotropic CA.
• Small-glider-bouncing-off-objects adjustable spaceships. Credit for the idea that this was worth exploring.
• Movostill 3 for its great potential in constructions and conduits, as well as its richness in extensible "adsorbed" spaceships.
• The design of rules with excruciatingly slow speeds with different approaches.
• The (initially) seemingly impossible pondlayer-based spaceship in tDryLife.
• AbhpzTa's replicator ships (also here) and his guns.
• Snowflakes, for its remarkable properties without being a clear variant of CGoL.
• The counter-intuitive one-cell universal constructor.
• The elementary ship with the shallowest slope, at (73,1).
• Proofs of several Turing-complete rules.
• All LTL developments, listed here and in other threads. This includes spaceships of weird morphology (here and here).

Is my invention/discovery of 1-cell universal constructors important enough? I'm obviously too biased to really tell:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3088&p=50797

AbhpzTa's HighLife parallel repships and gun:
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 616#p51616
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 577#p52577
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 404#p53404

The remarkable Snowflakes rule.

New relativistic seeds in isotropic CAs -- too many to compile right now on mobile (although that might be able to be combined with the larger 5S effort; I'm just a personal fan of relativistic ships specifically).

Activity in B2-ac3i4a/S12 died away within a few months, but I'd say it's probably one of the most remarkable rules explored last year. Honourable mention at least. It portrays loads of guns, engineered technology, etc.

My assorted adjustable-speed diagonal wickships:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=350#p52480
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=350#p52548
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=350#p52713
And wildmyron's ship bouncers:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=225#p50556
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=225#p50565
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=225#p50595
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1971&start=225#p50616

Maybe even my weird LTL stuff?

EDIT:
What about AforAmpere's slope 73 ship?
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 425#p53529

Saka wrote:My assorted adjustable-speed diagonal wickships:

And wildmyron's ship bouncers:

Maybe even my weird LTL stuff?

EDIT:
What about AforAmpere's slope 73 ship?
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 425#p53529

The first - I feel like that should be included together with the other finds of adjustable speeds. Wildmyron's and similar are already included.
As for LTL, I have thought about it, but what in particular? I must admit I have not been following LTL too much because of my inability to predict the dynamics and therefore to do anything useful with the rules...

Slope 73 ship is remarkable. Included now.

My 2cents:

• any rule with guns with not too dense streams+small right angle reflectors+2/(0,1)glider r.a. collisions, like snowflake etc.
• Banks-I rule and simplified XOR/IOR gates (Hello 1971! Updated in 2017)
• GMPL example for some CAs in higher dimensional tessellations
• at last but not least: W110 Unit cells, W30 Unit cells
  • B35/S236
  • any rule between Life and B38/S2378 (vintage small p6 glider reflector works in Life+B8/S8+S7 supporting p30 technology with small guns)

Note that W110 Unit cell constructions are a simple way to prove that all functions, Boolean networks could be embedded in the rule.

[EDIT]

Sorry, the GMPL example that successfully embeds any W110 automata into E^d (d>=6) with 3 states is a result from 2016. The model itself is in high-level modeling language. Basically, it was in Cplex LP format in 2016 (tidying had been performed and republished in 2017 as part of the GLPK example models)

If nominations are not coming anymore, maybe I should suggest some time in February as the cut-off point to actually vote for the 2017 OCA Discovery of the Year?

Naszvadi wrote:My 2cents:
bloated list with unnecessary duplications

(One entry) the following alien rules are Turing-complete if infinite tilings are permitted:

• B2ce3ai/S1c23-a
• B35/S236, see more at David Eppstein's G+
• Banks-I rule - it is a builtin rule in Golly (but you can play it in pattern viewer specifying rule B3e4ejr5cinqy6-ei78/S012-e3-ajk4-akqw5-ajk6-e78)
• B3/S23, B3/S238, B38/S23 and B38/S238

[EDIT #1] typo