3-4 Life/Snippet

3-4 Life (or 34 Life) is a Life-like cellular automaton in which a cell will be alive in the next generation if it has 3 or 4 alive neighbours present. It thus has rulestring "B34/S34". It was one of the earliest variants of Conway's Life to be studied and discussed, initially thought to be a stable alternative to Life, until computer simulation found that most patterns tend to explode.

Research on 3-4 Life dates back to 1971, when Rici Liknaitzky and Steve Ward of the MIT group experimented and documented many forms including the still life block, oscillators of period 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, and a period-3 orthogonal spaceship. Since then, Lifeline began to report more findings under the section of "Excursions Into the Universe of '3-4' Life".

Compared with Life, there are significantly fewer known still lives in 3-4 Life. Except for the 4-bit block, they are all extremely large and rare. They must all resemble large fortresses, whose outer walls must have corners resembling Life's ships or long ships, and connected by straight crenelations.