Soup

A soup (or broth[1]) is a random initial pattern. It may have different density, symmetry and could cover the whole Life universe or be finite.

<html><div class="rle"><div class="codebox"><div style="display:none;"><code></html>x = 0, y = 0, rule = B3/S23 ! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ RANDOMIZE HEIGHT 300 THUMBLAUNCH OFF ]]<html></code></div></div><canvas width="200" height="300" style="margin-left:1px;"><noscript></html>
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An example 64×64 soup generated by LifeViewer command (changes upon refreshing the page)
(click above to open LifeViewer)

Ash

Ash (or less commonly junk or debris) is the (stable, oscillating or flying) outcome of a soup or reaction.

Experiments show that for random soups in Life in finite plane with moderate initial densities (say 0.25 to 0.5), the resulting ash has a density of about 0.0287[citation needed]. In infinite fields the situation may be different in the long run because of certain rare patterns, like long-living quadratic replicators (if any) that produce a large enough "colony" and survive knocking into ash.

Sparse Life

Sparse Life (also called, somewhat confusingly, early universe by John Conway) is the study of the evolution of a soup of vanishingly small density in an infinite universe, and as such a part of cosmology. Such a universe is dominated at an early stage by blocks and blinkers (collectively known as "blonks") in a ratio of about 2:1, with rare structures created by common methuselahs (e.g. R-pentominoes and pi-heptominoes). Much later it will be dominated by simple infinite growth patterns (e.g. block-laying switch engine and glider-producing switch engine). The long-term fate of a sparse Life universe is not certain.

Soup search or soup searching is a method of searching for interesting patterns. It is done by running random soups in a specific rule, followed by counting the results and tabulating them.

Soup search can be implemented into languages like C and Python easily, making it popular. It can also be done manually in golly, with default key ctrl+5 to randomize a selected region.

It was employed in the Achim Flammenkamp's census, Andrzej Okrasinski's census and the Online Life-Like CA Soup Search. Currently large-scale soup searches are done with apgsearch.

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gollark: > just rewrite potatOS actuallyno.
gollark: It implements virtual files in a very hacky and not good way, and that is causing problems with my new feature.
gollark: I ran into some issues and now I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the potatOS sandboxing stuff.
gollark: I guess it doesn't matter much for my security model as it's only verifying signatures, but hmm.

See also

References
  1. Ethan Wilson (December 28, 2007). "Optimal Broth". Retrieved on June 16, 2009.
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