Caterloopillar is the name given to a family of spaceships containing two major parts - the front and the back. In Caterloopillar each part has the properties of a universal constructor, and thus each part is constructing the building blocks of the other part, while also reading and moving a construction tape. As the name suggests, this creates somewhat paradoxical design, similar to the "strange loop" concept.
The basic Caterloopillar design can be trivially adapted to produce spaceships with an infinite number of different speeds -- in theory, any rational speed strictly less than c/4.
August 14: Gustoneposts '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.
... that the single seldom-used extra transition of Pedestrian Life (B38/S23) from Life leads to several non-pedestrian linear growth patterns, including a reflectorless rotating glider gun, a set of (5,2)c/190 technology and a messy oblique p1884 puffer?
... that it was unknown whether there existed an unbounded sequence of patterns with greatN-grandparents but no greatN+1 grandparents, until Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo constructed a solution to this extended grandfather problem in early January 2022?
... that despite the fact that p5 quinti-Snark contains a period-5 oscillator, it can quintuple the period of any sufficiently sparse periodic glider stream?
