Cordership
A Cordership is any spaceship that is based on switch engines. They necessarily have speed c/12 diagonal and period that is a multiple of 96. Corderships were the slowest known spaceships before discovery of Gemini in 2010, although arbitrarily slow spaceships had been known to exist (see universal constructor). They are named after Charles Corderman, who discovered the switch engine in 1971.
The first Cordership, which used 13 switch engines, was found by Dean Hickerson in April 1991. He soon thereafter found a smaller 10-engine Cordership, and in August 1993 a 7-engine Cordership. In July 1998 he found the first 6-engine Cordership. Many Corderships are now known that use 8, 5, 4, 3, or 2 switch engines. The Switchwave allows extensible Corderships; an example 20-engine Cordership can be found in the respective article.
| first Cordership (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here |
Sparse Cordership
in 2017, David Bell discovered[1] a Cordership made from individual switch engines that do not directly react with each other. All previously-known Corderships required interactions between two or more adjacent switch engines. This design, on the other hand, allows the individual switch engines to be separated by arbitrary distances, relying instead on long-range interactions mediated by gliders and stable objects. Similar Corderships can be constructed having an arbitrarily large separation between any of the switch engines.
Gallery
See also
References
- ↑ David Bell (December 22, 2017). Re: Cordership made using individual switch engines (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
External links
- Cordership at the Life Lexicon