R2-D2 is a period-8oscillator that was found in the form shown in the infobox at right, but not named, by Peter Raynham in the early 1970s. The name derives from a form with a larger and less symmetric stator discovered later by Noam Elkies in August 1994, shown below.[1]
On 2022-11-30, the shown variant with the smallest stator appeared in a symmetric soup discovered by the Open Science Grid, albeit not in a way useful to synthesis, with the initial soup matching 50 states of the 70 cells in its minimal covering octagon and the mechanism forming entirely in one generation, with pre-blocks becoming blocks in the next.[3]
