Pattern of the Year

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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 by Alexey Nigin, 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.

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 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.

2016

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