Catagolue/Snippet

Catagolue is an ongoing distributed census of naturally occurring ash objects conducted by Adam P. Goucher, started in late February 2015. The census is primarily focused on asymmetric soups in Conway's Life, but supports arbitrary outer-totalistic and non-totalistic rules and a variety of symmetries.

The results are obtained by evolving random soups of size 16 × 16 with density 0.5 in an infinite planar universe; as of June 2, 2026, at least 587,443,221,069,880 soups have been investigated by the census's participants, yielding a total of at least 7,315,050,809,532,447 objects of 553,848 distinct types. Submissions of new results (called hauls) are subjected to both statistical tests and peer-review by other participants before being committed to the census.

Catagolue is primarily fed by apgsearch. Each resulting object is identified by apgsearch by its unique apgcode; the Catagolue website gives overviews over the various classes of objects found, and provides further information as well as sample soups for each object. A simple text-based interface for querying sample soups, including their owners, also exists.