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Today's featured article The bumper is a type of colour-preserving periodic reflector with a repeat time of 34 that was discovered by Tanner Jacobi on April 6, 2016. It consists of a transparent loaf, an eater, and a sparker. It can use sparkers of any period above period 3. The discovery of the bumper allowed many gun periods in the gun collection to be significantly reduced in terms of bounding box. 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 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? ... that the first elementary knightship, Sir Robin, was discovered only in 2018, with there having been a very close call in 2004? ... that there is a 5 × 2 counterexample to the Coolout Conjecture, proving that patterns that are internally compatible with stability can not always be made part of a larger still life, no matter what cells are added around the edges? ... that a Conway's Life pattern representing a complete programmable 8-bit computer, consisting only of buckaroos, p60 glider guns, and glider duplicators, was completed in November 2016? ... that whilst no elementary oblique spaceships were found in B3/S23 until 2018, and none have occurred naturally, at least two naturally occurring reactions have been discovered in B38/S23 that travel in an oblique direction? ... that not all statorless oscillators are phoenixes, but statorless period 2 oscillators must be phoenixes?           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