Broken lines
Broken lines is a pattern created by Dean Hickerson in May 2005 that produces a broken line of gliders heading southwest, created by the collision of two lines of LWSSs (which also produce a broken line going northeast). The two input lines are themselves broken by lines of gliders, one directly produced by a rake, the other produced by the collision of the northeast line of gliders colliding with the rake's line. This collision also intermittently produces additional gliders which wander off to the southwest, eventually impacting one of the lines of LWSSs.
Broken lines | |||||
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Pattern type | Miscellaneous | ||||
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Number of cells | 1766 | ||||
Bounding box | 277×118 | ||||
Discovered by | Dean Hickerson | ||||
Year of discovery | 2005 | ||||
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It is an open question whether the pattern eventually breaks, as the additional gliders may crash into the stationary gun, destroying it. Dean did not observe this in 535,000 generations, but suspected the failures may be "exponentially sparse" and that it might be billions of generations before one is seen. The pattern has been tested to at least 6,377,738,816 generations, without a failure observed.