Pianola breeder

The pianola breeders are a series of patterns by Paul Tooke in 2010, based on a simplification and extension of the Gemini spaceship's construction mechanism. Tooke produced a number of slow-salvo-constructed patterns with superlinear growth which he dubbed SSS breeders, including a series of breeders of previously unknown types. For some patterns, the Gemini's two construction arms were moved to a permanent stationary platform, using fourteen glider-loop channels instead of twelve.

Some of these breeder patterns remain difficult to classify unambiguously. For example, one pattern was designed to be an MSS breeder - a modified Gemini spaceship puffing slide guns which build lines of blocks. However, the slide guns produce both moving and stationary objects at a linear rate, because streams of gliders are needed to reach out to the construction zone to do the push reaction and build more blocks. The pattern could therefore be classified as a hybrid MSM/MSS breeder. Other breeder patterns utilizing slide guns and universal constructor technology are likely to cause similar classification ambiguities.

SSS breeder comparison

Paul Tooke's SSS breeder starts out with a bounding box of size 1893784 × 947929. A different SSS breeder design by Entity Valkyrie in July 2022 has an initial bounding box of only 17390 × 27384. The new design has a somewhat higher ratio of moving support structure (i.e., the gliders in the various slide guns) to stationary pattern, but ultimately the presence of some moving parts will always be necessary. In the absence of a clear metric for comparison, it's not clear why one design should be preferred over another.

Pattern files

The pattern files for Tooke's example are massive. They can be accessed with the following links:

• SSS breeder at generation 0
• SSS breeder at generation 19,136,512
• SSS breeder at generation 222,949,376

External links

• Pianola breeder at the Life Lexicon