This week's featured article

In the news

• August 29: Goldtiger997 completes a synthesis of the first known 2c/5 spaceship, 44P5H2V0, almost thirty years after its discovery.
• August 23: Adam P. Goucher adds to slmake a fast elbow push recipe created by Pavel Grankovskiy, based on a c/4 diagonal crab wickstretcher. This means that recipes for self-constructing structures with a not-quite-attainable limit speed of c/4 can now be semi-automatically compiled.
• August 16: Tanner Jacobi discovers a 14-glider recipe for a crab spaceship, down from the previous cost of 16, which can be used to reduce the size and construction cost of a wickstretcher seed.
• August 14: Rob Liston finds via apgsearch a third natural loafer emerging from asymmetric soup.
• August 10: Syntheses of a variety of pufferfish spaceships make their way to Catagolue, thanks to an extension of the time required in online recipe submissions for all gliders to react.
• August 2-18: Tanner Jacobi completes and later improves a 1G seed for a c/4 diagonal wickstretcher, enabling self-constructing spaceships with the fastest possible diagonal speed of (just below) c/4.

Pattern collection

• 1359 patterns (including 519 oscillators, 129 spaceships and 337 still lifes);
• 2281 images (508 animated and 1773 static);
• Over 3000 downloadable pattern files;
• Glider syntheses for 746 patterns.

Download pattern collection 2 MB .zip archive containing the 1500+ RLE pattern files used on the wiki

• ... that some periodic objects -- e.g., a pentadecathlon hassled by period-7 pipsquirters -- can be perturbed to cause them to skip forwards 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 the caterpillar contains over 11 million cells, and the 0E0P metacell contains over 18 million cells?
• ... that the Gosper glider gun was the first pattern to be discovered that exhibits infinite growth?
• ... that the block-laying switch engine and the glider-producing switch engine (and various combinations of two switch engines) are the only infinitely-growing patterns that are known to have ever occurred naturally from an asymmetric random starting configuration?
• ... that oscillators are known that oscillate at all periods other than 19, 34, 38 and 41?
• ... that the pentadecathlon and the blinker are the only known oscillators that are polyominos in more than one phase?
• ... that it is impossible for a period-3 oscillator to be a phoenix?
• ... that the 16×16 soup with the longest known lifespan lasts for over 49,000 generations before stabilizing?
• ... that replicators with quadratic population growth have been known to exist in Conway's Game of Life since the early 1970s, but none were found until 2018 when Adam P. Goucher constructed the 0E0P metacell?