Main Page

Welcome to LifeWiki, the wiki for Conway's Game of Life. Currently contains 2,754 articles.

Guns Methuselahs Oscillators

Puffers Spaceships Still lifes

Other cellular automata All patterns Everything else

Today's featured article Simkin glider gun is a glider gun, found by Michael Simkin on April 28, 2015. It consists of a Herschel running in two period-60 conduits, producing infinite copies of the first natural glider. In terms of its single-barreled form it is the smallest known gun, with 36 cells, sharing the record with the Gosper glider gun. In its pseudo-period, boat-bit form and its double-barrelled form it is the absolute record holder, with 35 and 29 cells respectively. Read more... In the news August 14: Gustone posts 'stentor', a more efficient redesign of a (23,5)c/79 spaceship distinct from the waterbear; in Real Life, a stentor is a trumpet-shaped protozoan on the same order of size as a tardigrade. August 5: ElijahKen constructs the first Demonoid to fully fit inside a Lifeviewer window. July 26: Caleb R. Hilton discovers the first period-39 glider gun based on a dependent reflector by Nora Brown. This was the highest unsolved period and the last remaining multiple of 3. Only seven periods are still unsolved: 17, 19, 23, 26, 29, 31, and 38. July 23: GilGil re-creates previous macro-pattern "printer" functionality using (12,4)c/62 solifuge technology. June 22: Brithos's first-ever forum post contains a very large completed engineered spaceship based on the (28,3)c/84 Herschel climber reaction. Editable news item submissions page • Archive •

Did you know... ... that a relay glider bouncing back and forth between two pentadecathlons was one of the earliest constructive proofs that oscillators can have arbitrarily high periods? ... that there are spacefiller patterns that grow quadratically to fill space with an agar with density 1/2 (zebra stripes)? ... that a row of appropriately placed traffic lights is one of the few known wicks that can be extended by "pushing" from its stationary end? ... that space nonfiller patterns have been constructed that expand to affect the entire Life plane, leaving an expanding region of vacuum at their center? ... that there exist non-monotonic spaceships, even some with period as low as 3, whose leading edges fall back in at least one generation? ... that some periodic objects -- e.g., a pentadecathlon hassled by period-7 pipsquirters or a 28P7.1 hassled by a mold -- can be perturbed to cause them to skip forward or fall behind by one or more phases in their cycle? ... that more stable seed constellations for moving objects were completed in 2020 than in all preceding years put together? ... that Don Woods developed the text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure with Will Crowther, who was previously Dave Greene's father's roommate for a time at MIT? ... that Rob's p16, with only 21 cells and fitting in a 9 × 8 bounding box, was only discovered via a large-scale apgsearch soup search in 2020? ... that the minimum one-cell thick solid line that produces escaping gliders has 56 cells?           Showing 10 items out of 197 More did you know... Pattern collection The LifeWiki contains one of the most comprehensive catalogues of patterns available on the internet. Within it you will find: 1768 patterns (including 713 oscillators, 233 spaceships and 375 still lifes); 3556 images (599 animated and 2957 static); Over 3000 downloadable pattern files; Glider syntheses for 1024 patterns. Download pattern collection 6MB .zip archive containing the 5200+ Game of Life RLE pattern files used on the wiki Also available: 38KB .zip archive containing approximately 75 pattern files for other cellular automata