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Today's featured article The syringe is a glider-to-Herschel converter composed of an eater 1, a block, a beehive with tail, and a large welded still life that combines an eater 2 and an eater 5. It works by converting a bait block into a pi, then hassling the pi into a B-heptomino that restores the bait block over the course of its evolution. The syringe allows much more compactness and timing versatility in signal circuitry than Herschel conduits alone. The syringe was voted on ConwayLife.com as Pattern of the Year 2015. Read more... In the news November 11: Elijah Ken reduces the Carotenoid flamingoship to a form which narrowly but clearly fits in an expanded LifeViewer, with minimum population of 11045 and unsimplified speed (132,22)c/120000 (simplified (66,11)c/60000). October 31: ENDW posts a 50c/631254 orthogonal spaceship, which works by storing oncoming glider gun construction arm recipes in two long Herschel loops, each of which alternately lengthens the front end and shortens the back end of the opposing loop. October 23: ENDW completes a builder script for an optimized version 3 of the omniship from September, with a sample spaceship that's (8388608,4194304)c/29360128 -- simplified speed (2,1)c/7. October 16: David Bell constructs an engineless 3c/7 orthogonal rake, demonstrating that 3c/7 rakes of all periods 770 or greater can be constructed. October 13: David Bell discovers a period-35 3c/7 orthogonal rake based on a spaceship by iNoMed. October 10: 400spartans posts a population-321 unsynthesizable oscillator with a 275-cell self-forcing patch, a considerable improvement over the previous smallest known unsynthesizable oscillator. Editable news item submissions page • Archive •

Did you know... ... that with the appearance of the 0E0P metacell, the number of periods for which strict volatility 1 oscillators were known went from 12 to infinity? ... that Copperhead is not only the first c/10 orthogonal spaceship ever found, but also remarkably compact for a pattern not discovered until 2016? ... that loafer is the fifth smallest non-flotilla spaceship, but was discovered 43 years after the four spaceships smaller than it? ... that despite being the fourth smallest non-flotilla orthogonal spaceship, loafer did not appear from a single randomly generated soup until 2020? ... that all known glider eaters take at least four ticks to recover to their original state after eating a glider? ... that among Life-like (outer-totalistic) rules, Conway's Life's "near neighbours" B35/S23, B36/S23, and B38/S23 are not explosive, but B37/S23 is? ... that there is roughly one chance in 10^(N/3) that a still life appearing out of random soup will have a population of exactly N cells? ... that the number of still lifes with N+1 bits is roughly 2.48 times larger than the number of N-bit still lifes? ... that the odds of a randomly-chosen 20 × 20 soup pattern being a methuselah that lasts between N and N + 1000 ticks, are roughly the same as the odds that it will last any amount of time longer than N + 1000 ticks? ... that all still lifes up to 17 cells can be synthesized at a cost of less than one glider per cell?           Showing 10 items out of 197 More did you know... Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1773 patterns (including 715 oscillators, 235 spaceships and 375 still lifes); 3557 images (599 animated and 2958 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 1026 patterns. Download pattern collection 6MB .zip archive containing the 5200+ Game of Life RLE pattern files used on the wiki Also available: 38KB .zip archive containing approximately 75 pattern files for other cellular automata