Natural
There are two distinct definitions of natural.
Naturalness
Under the narrower definition, a natural object is one that occurs often in the ash of random patterns. There is no precise measure of naturalness,[1] since the most useful definition of "random" in this context is open to debate; nonetheless, objects such as blocks, blinkers, beehives and gliders are very natural and appear in the majority of soups, while objects such as figure eights and queen bee shuttles are less natural, occurring rarely. Darts, Gosper glider guns, etc., are not natural as of February 2023, having never appeared in an asymmetric soup.
Catagolue
Less strictly, an object is said to occur naturally if it has been found in the ash of an asymmetric random soup at least once; the object in question may then also be said to be natural, e.g. "a natural Coe ship" (even though it forms rarely, and is not very natural in the above sense).
Objects found in the ash of symmetric random soups are said to occur semi-naturally (or sometimes almost naturally). The dart is an example of a semi-natural pattern, having appeared in soups with bilateral symmetry.
Under the influence of Catagolue, the definition of a "random soup" in this context is an 16 × 16 pattern where a SHA-256 preimage string is known.
See also
- Natural periodic objects (category)
- Semi-natural periodic objects (category)
- List of natural spaceships
- Common
- First natural glider, Second natural glider, First natural block
References
External links
- Natural at the Life Lexicon
- Small Unnatural Objects Watchlist (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums