Pattern of the Year

The Pattern of the Year competition is held each year on the ConwayLife.com forums. Users are invited to submit interesting and noteworthy patterns, their own or others'; following discussion, a final list is then curated, and a public vote held. There are only two hard and fast rules: patterns must have been discovered in the year in question; and patterns must work in B3/S23 (Conway's Game of Life).

2016

The following patterns were voted on for the 2016 competition. Users were able to vote on as many patterns as they wished, awarding up to three stars to each one. Alexey Nigin organized the competition.

Final rank	Stars	Pattern	Author
Description
1	49	Caterloopillars	Michael Simkin, David Bell et al.
Previously, all engineered spaceships had speeds that were either fixed (Caterpillar) or adjustable but always very low (Gemini). Caterloopillars have the best of both worlds: their speed is variable, and the fastest ones can travel as quickly as c/4. So far all caterloopillars have been orthogonal, but a project to build one with adjustable slope is underway.
2	47	Copperhead	zdr, Simon Ekström et al.
In addition to being the first of its speed, this c/10 orthogonal spaceship is so small that it is surprising nobody discovered it before. Its small size allowed the creation of a 22-glider synthesis, and a gun was made soon afterwards. A pseudo-tagalong found a bit later made it possible to create c/10 puffers and rakes. Much of copperhead's fame is due to the mystery surrounding its discovery: it was posted by a newly-joined anonymous user who got inactive afterwards.
3	39	Grandfather-less Pattern	mtve
"Is there a configuration which has a father but no grandfather?" This is the statement of the grandfather problem, one of the longest-standing open problems in Life, having been unsolved for decades in spite of a $50 prize offer from John Conway Himself in September 1972. It was only this year that the first grandfather-less pattern was discovered using a SAT solver.
4	31	Spaghetti monster	Tim Coe
This is the first spaceship with a speed of 3c/7, which has been one of the most sought-after speeds in the last 15 years. The ship was discovered with knightt, a relatively new search program. The search took about two months, even though the width was continuously tweaked to make it faster.
5	28	8-bit computer	Coban
This is the first 8-bit computer in any cellular automaton, and easily the most realistic computer ever constructed in Life. It has a ROM which contains the program, consisting of 32 instructions which are stored in 21 bits each. For RAM, it has a register bank containing eight 8-bit registers. For output, it has a "printer" with 8 pixels.
6	19	Herschel splitter	Luka Okanishi
This is an elegant solution to an old circuitry problem: a direct Herschel signal splitter that recovers in less than a hundred ticks. People had been looking for something exactly like this for very nearly twenty years, ever since the original 1996-97 universal set of Herschel conduits. It was made by extending an Fx119 conduit with a partial copy of itself to extract the second Herschel output.
7	14	Bumper	Tanner Jacobi
This reflector mechanism can be attached to a variety of sparky oscillators to make reflectors of the corresponding periods. Since the resulting reflectors have different timing than the snark, they solve a range of "my glider is in the wrong phase" wiring problems. A small wave of record-breaking guns followed soon after the bumper's debut.
=8	12	New gun periods	Luka Okanishi, thunk, Matthias Merzenich, Chris Cain
In three days, three new true gun periods were discovered: p61, p58, and p57.
=8	12	Statorless p5	Josh Ball
This is the first statorless oscillator of its period. Since the period is prime, the lack of stator implies that the oscillator is strictly volatile, which is a rare property.
10	11	Aperiodic tiles	NotLiving
This is an implementation of a particular set of Wang tiles in the Game of Life. The Life tiles form a stable pattern if and only if the corresponding arrangement of Wang tiles is valid. Since this set of Wang tiles can only form aperiodic arrangements, so can the Life tiles.
11	10	Rich's p16	Rich Holmes
This is a small p16 oscillator that appeared naturally. It is compact for its period and has easily accessible sparks. Most notably, it can filter glider streams similarly to the blocker, which led to reductions in many guns that previously utilized other filter mechanisms.
12	9	Small GoEs	Steven Eker
A few record-breaking Gardens of Eden and orphans were found, including an orphan with only 89 defined cells.
=13	6	15-bit still life syntheses	BlinkerSpawn, Goldtiger997, Bob Shemyakin, Mark Niemiec, Martin Grant, Chris Cain, et al.
A project to find syntheses of all 15-bit still lifes in under 15 gliders turned out to be a very prolific collaboration. Using Catagolue soups along with known and new converter mechanisms, several hundred new syntheses were created. The goal was achieved in just 41 days.
=13	6	p7 sparker	Dongook Lee
This pattern adds a new relatively strong HW emulator to the p7 collection, which previously only had the pipsquirter. It was used to complete a p28 wick with no prior stabilization.

2015

The following patterns were voted on for the 2015 competition. Users chose as many pattern as they wanted and ranked them from best to worst; the votes were then tallied with a custom Delphi program. Alexey Nigin organized the competition.

Final rank	Points	Pattern	Author
Description
1	107	Syringe	Tanner Jacobi
Syringe is the fast G-to-H that Herschel plumbers have been wishing for a decade, also allowing for fast signal splitters and other much more efficient logic circuits, including self-constructing circuitry.
2	102	Simkin glider gun	Michael Simkin
The Simkin glider gun is the smallest gun ever constructed. The previous record holder, the Gosper glider gun, was constructed as long ago as 1970.
3	91	Demonoids	Chris Cain and Dave Greene
Demonoids are highly-simplified, diagonally-moving variants of the original Gemini spaceship. The 0hd Demonoid is the only case where a spaceship gun pattern was completed before the actual spaceship.
4	55	Syntheses of spaceships	Martin Grant, Tanner Jacobi, and Chris Cain
Syntheses of B29, X66, half-X66 with HWSS, Pushalong 1, 25P3H1V0.2, 30P5H2V0, 30P4H2V0.4, a pufferfish spaceship, and the weekender were discovered in 2015, which exceeds the number of spaceship syntheses found in any previous year, including 1970.
5	48	Recursive filter	Alexey Nigin and Kiran Linsuain
Recursive Filter allows the creation of extremely slow-growing patterns. A single recursive filter gives the growth rate of log*(t), which is slower than the growth rate of any pattern constructed before. Recursive filters can be stacked to obtain even more mind-boggling growth rates.
6	45	Glider-to-Weekender	Chris Cain
G-to-Weekender splits a single input glider into 82 separate signals, and successfully synchronizes them to produce an output weekender spaceship. The previous record synchronization was Goucher's glider-to-Cordership converter, which produced 19 synchronized gliders from one input signal.
7	34	Bob Shemyakin's syntheses	Bob Shemyakin
Bob Shemyakin's syntheses are often cheaper than what could be found in Mark Niemiec's database (and those were already pretty good). This was the result of a lot of patient script-writing and collecting collision results, starting with adding two gliders (within a certain range) to every possible two-glider collision. Many new 4-, 5-, and 6-glider still life recipes were found, and optimizations for many larger still lifes up to 15 bits.
8	33	HBK gun	Chris Cain and Michael Simkin
HBK gun is an extremely large and complex gun that fires parallel HBKs. It is the only gun to produce non-self-constructing macro-spaceships.
9	31	Herschel-to-MWSS	Tanner Jacobi
H-to-MWSS is the smallest converter of Herschels into (non-glider) standard spaceships. Prior constructions of XWSSs required many Herschel tracks and a large area.
10	30	Sawtooth 177	thunk, Tanner Jacobi, Chris Cain, Adam P. Goucher, and Dave Greene
Sawtooth 177 is currently the smallest known sawtooth.
11	29	Single-lane construction arm toolkit	Simon Ekström
The Single-Lane Construction Arm Toolkit is an important result for simplifying self-constructing circuitry, especially those where a recipe needs to be duplicated, as in the linear propagator, not just interpreted as in the Demonoid and Gemini.
12	28	Elementary conduits collection	Matthias Merzenich, Dave Greene, and thunk
The Elementary Conduits Collection, recently significantly expanded with new discoveries, is a one-stop shop for the building blocks of stable tracks. It was organized to catalogue all converters between likely active reactions, not just from Herschel to Herschel.
13	26	(L|M)WSS-to-glider	Ivan Fomichev and Dongook Lee
(L|M)WSS-to-G is the second known small conduit that turns standard spaceships into gliders, and the first that accepts LWSSs.
14	23	Collection of guns	Chris Cain, Simon Ekström, Scot Ellison, and Dave Greene
The Collection of Guns is an ambitious project to collect new smaller glider guns using the syringe and other recent discoveries. All guns in the range 78-999 were eventually reduced to bounding boxes less than 8000 cells.
15	19	Dragon lightsaber	Martin Grant
Dragon Lightsaber is a mysterious pattern that seems to calculate some sequence. It is this type of a lightsaber.
16	14	Quadratic sawtooth	Martin Grant, Aidan F. Pierce, Dongook Lee, and Alexey Nigin
Quadratic sawtooth is a sawtooth whose population peaks grow quadratically.
17	13	t*log(log(t)) growth	Alexey Nigin and Michael Simkin
t*log(log(t)) growth is pattern with an exotic growth rate. That growth rate has long been achievable via exponential filters, but this pattern utilizes a completely different design.

2014

No vote was held for 2014, but the following patterns were submitted as competition entries by users. Kiran Linsuain organized the competition.

Pattern	Author
Description
Waterbear	Brett Berger and Ivan Fomichev
The first fast oblique spaceship.
Centipede	Chris Cain
Half-baked knightship	Adam P. Goucher, Chris Cain, Dave Greene, and Ivan Fomichev
An oblique spaceship.
Switch engine ping-pong	Michael Simkin
A 23-cell quadratic growth pattern, the smallest known.
Weekender distaff	Ivan Fomichev
A 2c/7 rake.
Syntheses for all 17- and 18-bit still lifes	?
Pufferfish	Richard Schank
Dart and crab syntheses [1]	Martin Grant, Mark Niemiec, Michael Simkin, Ivan Fomichev, Tanner Jacobi, and Brett Berger
Spiral growth [2]	Dave Greene

External links

2016

• Pattern of the Year 2016 (Entries) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums

• Pattern of the Year 2016 (Votes) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums

• Pattern of the Year 2016 (Results) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums

2015

• Pattern of the Year 2015 (Entries) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums

• Pattern of the Year 2015 (Votes) (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums