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Hi everyone, I’m writing a fictional book and I’m looking for some help with a Game of Life idea for symbolism and plot purposes.

I’d like to take a methuselah and somehow turn it into a pattern that grows indefinitely. However, there are a couple of things I’m unsure about:

1. Is this actually possible?
2. Ideally, I’d like to accomplish it by adding only a small, fixed number of cells at some point during the simulation. For the symbolism, it would be especially fitting if something as small as reversing a glider (fewer than 10 cells) could somehow trigger the methuselah to go completely crazy and become an infinite-growth pattern.

The chance of a switch engine (block-laying or glider-producing) is about 1 in 2 million for a 16×16 pattern. 256 choose 3 is 2.8 million, so if you start with something that's 16×16 and run a script to toggle all possibilities of 3 cells, you'll have a decent chance (not guaranteed though) to find something that produces infinite growth. 4 cells will almost definitely do it.

hotdogPi wrote: September 3rd, 2026, 6:16 am 4 cells will almost definitely do it.

1 cell will definitely do it. Just start your engineering from the other direction: take any of the bajillion known soups that produce linear growth patterns -- anything you like the looks of from the "yl" column in Catagolue, for example -- and toggle one cell. Very likely the altered soup will no longer be a linear-growth pattern, so that becomes your starting point.

It depends on your definition of "methuselah", of course. You could test all possible 1-cell toggles and start from the one that has the longest lifespan. Whatever your starting-pattern criteria are, it should be easy to find a match (since it's easy to generate and test millions of candidates, or billions if necessary).

If you want something a little wilder, you could do the same reverse engineering on a quadratic-growth pattern like Max. For example, try adding a cell in the center of this:
It's possible to backtrack this-pattern-plus-central-cell by five or ten ticks, to produce a slightly bigger starting pattern that's not necessarily symmetrical -- such that toggling one central cell would produce a methuselah with few or no visible structural clues that it's capable of producing a spacefiller just by toggling that one cell back again.

Ditto for this smaller starting pattern, which requires a one-cell removal to get back to Max: