SMOS

A SMOS (Spaceship Made Of Spaceships) is a spaceship in a cellular automaton, consisting of multiple other spaceships colliding with each other, causing a reaction to take place where the spaceships are regenerated separately, all displaced by the same distance. That is, a SMOS is a self-synthesizing spaceship.

Such spaceship conglomerations can be, on rare occasions, SMOS'ed again together to create a SMOSMOS (Spaceship Made of Spaceships Made of Spaceships). Spaceships used in SMOSes must also work as normal spaceships by themselves, with a different speed and/or direction of travel from the complete SMOS.

A stricter definition of SMOS requires the spaceships used in the SMOS to be allowed to go through 1 full oscillation cycle before interacting with the other.

By analogy, other "objects made out of spaceships" can be described as '?MOS' where '?' is replaced by a letter corresponding to the type of the object (e.g. OMOS is an oscillator made out of spaceships).

Elementary example outside Life

There are known elementary examples of SMOSes in alien rules (cellular automata other than Conway's Game of Life). The T-tetromino is a spaceship in a large range of isotropic non-totalistic rules (for example tlife), as shown in Panel 1 below. It can be used to create many kinds of SMOS, one of which is shown in Panel 2. This particular SMOS, one of the simplest known, can also collide with another copy of itself in the specific rule B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 (written using Hensel notation) to generate a SMOSMOS (Panel 3).

x = 3, y = 4, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 bo$obo2$3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ HEIGHT 600 THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 3 ZOOM 21 GPS 2 AUTOSTART TRACKLOOP 5 0 -1/5 ]]

Panel 1: T-tetromino (click above to open LifeViewer) Catagolue: here

x = 8, y = 8, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 obo$o2bo$obo2$6bo$5bobo2$5b3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ HEIGHT 600 THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 3 ZOOM 21 GPS 6 AUTOSTART TRACKLOOP 18 -1/-18 -1/18 ]]

Panel 2: SMOS (click above to open LifeViewer) Catagolue: here

x = 8, y = 22, rule = B34enw5q6ae7c/S2ac3-cknq4-aenqt5akqy8 5b3o2$5bobo$6bo2$obo$o2bo$obo7$obo$o2bo$obo2$6bo$5bobo2$5b3o! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ HEIGHT 600 THUMBLAUNCH THUMBSIZE 3 ZOOM 21 GPS 10 AUTOSTART TRACKLOOP 92 -6/-92 -0 ]]

Panel 3: SMOSMOS (click above to open LifeViewer) Catagolue: here

Engineered example in the Game of Life

On August 2, 2021, Goldtiger997 constructed a (16461006,16460963)c/75568091 self-synthesizing oblique loopship in Conway's Game of Life based on a design from Dave Greene, providing the first explicit SMOS in regular Life. In some phases, this oblique loopship consists of 144,221 gliders: a two-glider collision synthesizing a block, two identical salvoes of 72,109 gliders following each other on the same lane -- and a single trigger glider that is offset 62 lanes from the single-channel stream. This "ringmaster glider" is responsible for igniting the wick of the crabstretcher that produces the faraway target that is converted into the next pair of colliding gliders, and it also triggers the self-destruct sequence for the memory loop once the second copy of its contents has been emitted. A gun for the self-synthesising spaceship was posted on August 8.

On November 11, 2022, Goldtiger997 constructed Speed Orthogonal Loopship, a 7766080c/209071672 spaceship and the first SMOS made entirely out of xWSSs.

External links

• Spaceships made up of other spaceships (SMOS) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums