History of Catagolue

The following is an overview of the history of Adam P. Goucher's Catagolue.

2015

• February 20: Catagolue becomes operative.
• April 24: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of one trillion objects.
• September 2: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of ten trillion objects.
• September 16: the pony express, the first natural infinite-growth pattern other than the block-laying switch engine and glider-producing switch engine is found in a soup. After being initially rejected by Catagolue, the containing haul is recomputed and manually committed on September 28.
• September 24: Catagolue supports the generation of backups, including daily backups for the C1 symmetry of Conway's Game of Life.
• October 5: the first instance of Phoenix 1, the last remaining unseen 12-bit object, is found.
• October 21: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of twenty trillion objects.
• October 27: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of one trillion soups.

2016

• January 25: praosylen releases a hacked version of apgsearch v0.54 which can search isotropic rules and upload the results to Catagolue.
• February 20: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 50 trillion objects exactly one year after Catagolue was launched.
• June 20: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 100 trillion objects.
• July 5: a new period-16 oscillator, Rich's p16, is discovered in the ash of a D2_+1 soup.
• July 6: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 5 trillion soups.
• August 12: a 56-bit still life, the cloverleaf interchange, is found in the B3/S23/C1 census, making it the largest still life to appear naturally.
• August 22: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 100,000 distinct objects.
• September 4: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 150 trillion objects.
• September 20: D2_+2 becomes the first B3/S23 symmetry other than C1 to reach 1 trillion objects.

2017

• January 13: Catagolue starts collecting slow salvo data using the SS pseudo-symmetry.
• March 15: B38/S23/C1 (Pedestrian Life) becomes the first rule/symmetry other than B3/S23/C1 to reach 10 trillion objects.
• May 16: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 200 trillion objects.
• August 19: Catagolue gains the ability to census Generations and B0 rules, fed by apgsearch 4.0.
• August 21: Catagolue gains the ability to census Larger than Life rules, fed by apgsearch 4.1.
• September 10: Catagolue gains official support for isotropic non-totalistic rules, fed by apgsearch 4.2. Previously, these rules required a hacked version of the original apgsearch Golly script.

2018

• June 3: Catagolue gains the ability to census Generations variants of Larger than Life and isotropic non-totalistic rules, fed by apgsearch 4.3.
• October 28: Catagolue starts collecting data on long-lived patterns, fed by apgsearch 4.54.
• October 29: Catagolue gains the ability to census BSFKL rules, fed by apgsearch 4.56.
• November 7: Catagolue gains the ability to census higher-range totalistic Life-like cellular automata, fed by apgsearch 4.63.
• November 29: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 250 trillion objects.
• December 1: Catagolue gains the ability to census isotropic hexagonal neighborhood rules, fed by apgsearch 4.66; only C1, 1x256, 2x128, 4x64 and 8x32 were initially supported, not higher symmetries, as these were incompatible with the hexagonal neighbourhood. Later, support for all hexagonal symmetries except for C3_3 and D6_3 was added.
• December 11: the first instance of the heptapole, the last remaining unseen 13-bit object, is found.
• December 11: Catagolue starts collecting data on diehards, fed by apgsearch 4.69.
• December 12: Catagolue supports gzip compression of certain tabulations.
• December 26: The source code for Catagolue is released under an MIT licence.

2019

• January 3: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 300 trillion objects.
• January 9: Catagolue gains the ability to census Golly rule tables and rule trees, fed by apgsearch 4.8.
• January 15: Catagolue gains native support for Deficient and Extended Generations rules, fed by apgsearch 4.83.
• February 12: a Schick engine first appears naturally in an asymmetric soup.
• March 3: a figure eight on pentadecathlon first appears in an asymmetric soup, making it the highest period oscillator to have occurred naturally.
• March 24: Catagolue starts collecting data on soups with large final populations, fed by apgsearch 5.03.
• March 27: the first instance of long⁴ melusine, the last remaining unseen 14-bit still life, is found.
• March 31: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of one million submitted hauls.
• April 12: Catagolue starts collecting data about glider syntheses from Shinjuku.
• April 14: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 400 trillion objects.
• May 1: the glider synthesis submission box is added, allowing users to submit syntheses which are automatically parsed during the Catagolue update process.
• May 12: a GPU-powered apgsearch instance finds a natural sidecar in an asymmetric 16×16 soup.
• September 9: the 17-in-17 glider synthesis project is completed, using Catagolue's synthesis tabulations for bookkeeping.
• October 9: the 18-bit still life synthesis project is completed, using Catagolue's synthesis tabulations for bookkeeping.
• December 18: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 500 trillion objects.
• December 27: X3VI becomes the first isotropic non-totalistic rule to officially reach 1 trillion objects.

2020

• February 8: the 19-bit still life synthesis project is completed, using Catagolue's synthesis tabulations for bookkeeping.
• February 9: Rob's p16 appears in the B3/S23/G1 census, marking Catagolue's first discovery of a new oscillator rotor from asymmetric soup as well as the first period 16 oscillator arising from asymmetry.
• February 11: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 600 trillion objects.
• April 1: a natural loafer emerges from a soup in the B3/S23/C1 census submitted by John Goodman.
• April 2: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 700 trillion objects.
• April 8: the asymmetric-soups census is created, combining the results from B3/S23/C1 and B3/S23/G1.
• May 4: B3/S23/G1 overtakes B3/S23/C1 in terms of the number of soups investigated.
• June 16: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 800 trillion objects.
• November 14: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 900 trillion objects.
• December 20 or earlier: Catagolue becomes capable of censusing isotropic non-totalistic rules with B0, as well as isotropic non-totalistic rules run on the exploded Moore neighbourhoods FC2E1 and FC1E3 and the range-2 von Neumann neighbourhood.

2021

• January 25: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of one quadrillion objects.
• March 12: the 20-bit still life synthesis project is completed, using Catagolue's synthesis tabulations for bookkeeping.
• June 17: Catagolue starts collecting data about the smallest known glider guns (by bounding box) of a given period, in the gun tabulation of synthesis-costs. The next day, a second guntrue tabulation was added, listing only the smallest true period guns.
• August 4: An RLE-to-apgcode box is added to the /object page.
• August 24: Catagolue's census tabulation system is upgraded, allowing for individual tabulations to reach an uncompressed size of 32 MB.
• October 19: Catagolue begins recognizing patterns with xg prefixes as glider guns, following the introduction of xg in lifelib. Support for xg in the RLE-to-apgcode box has yet to be added.

2022

• January 6: apgsearch is set up as a volunteer computing project on Charity Engine, vastly increasing the search rate to several trillion objects per day.
• January 18: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 1.5 quadrillion objects.
• February 11: Charity Engine discovers 32P21, then the smallest known period-21 oscillator.
• February 12: Charity Engine discovers a symmetric soup containing a bi-gun, the second unique gun to have occurred semi-naturally.
• February 15: Charity Engine discovers a new period-30 glider gun, which can be monomerized to only contain a single queen bee.
• April 13: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 2 quadrillion objects.
• May 18: Charity Engine discovers 30P25, then the smallest known period-25 oscillator.
• August 9: The Open Science Grid begins contributing GPU resources to Catagolue.
• August 13: The all-soups census is created, combining the results from all CPU and GPU symmetries in B3/S23 six times every month.
• October 7: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 3 quadrillion objects.

2023

• February 21: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 4 quadrillion objects.
• August 24: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 5 quadrillion objects.

2024

• April 8: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 6 quadrillion objects.

2025

• January 18: Long^9 snake occurs in a C1 soup, meaning all still lifes with 15 bits or less have occurred naturally.
• April 9: the B3/S23/C1 census reaches a total of 7 quadrillion objects.