Posted by nooks 12/3/2025
glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship
it's like calling all birds a parrot
If you're talking about Conway's Game of Life patterns, then "gliders" are the 5-cell spaceships that travel diagonally, and all other moving things are "spaceships" but not "gliders". If you call a Conway's Life non-glider spaceship a "glider" you'll mostly just confuse people.
But if you're talking about other CA rules -- especially rules where there isn't any 5-cell diagonal spaceship -- then "glider" is very commonly used to refer to other moving patterns.
For example, David Eppstein's "Gliders in Life-Like Cellular Automata" database was active for decades -- recording spaceships across a large rulespace, not just Conway's Life. It's an accepted generalization of the term, somewhat like saying "Xerox machine" for any old copying machine whether or not it was built by Xerox.
Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...
> So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here
My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to repeat).
what I am personally still wondering is,
what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?
I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,
so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?
Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?
Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?
I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...
glider is one specific spaceship, but name for moving patterns is spaceship
The level of engineering necessary to do this in 1 dimension is still beyond me, as is the "simple" explanation posted on the Conway forums. But I feel like I appreciate the achievement a little bit more now.
Of course, the "just" here does the heavy lifting and represents over two years of exploration, writing algorithms for how to clean up everything, and so on.
There’s search programs too, for smaller patterns. This construction is just too big and with such a long period. The search space would be enormous.
I got involved in this stuff years ago when I modified a search program for Life to search any CA rule. That’s how we found the HighLife rule and others like Day and Night.
Summary: In the end I was able to go through full period with the memory limit set to 35GB of memory. Most of the time all the action happens in 1+3x2 straight lines with different angles no more than 100 cells wide each. There were multiple distinct phases. Some one could definitely make an interesting visualization zooming in one the distinct regions at different stages of progression. General shape is horizontal line, <- shaped arrow, arrow with kite head, arrow with 2 nested kites, 2 giant nested kites, kite, arrow, horizontal line.
At first I was able to simulate first 15*10^9 generations quite quickly. And you could see some of initial stages. During first 2e9 generations it was using only 500MB of memory, somewhere between 2e9-4e9 it started to slow down. After bumping the memory it limit to 16G it was able to spedup again until ~15e9.
Initially it looks like 3 strings xxx. First one the shortest, second slightly longer and third even longer. Pattern xxx oscilates between horizontal and vertical giving stable form to store information.
Shortest string starts to get consumed from right to left.At some point it emits 2 gliders diagonally to the up/left and down left. After a while there are 2 vertical spaceships which collide with 2 diagonal gliders. After a bit more it starts to emit stream of gliders to the up right direction with overall shape being like arrow. At the back of arrows the gliders start to build a structure for next stage. The constructed structure starts creating bigger stream in the up right direction which in turn starts emiting stream down right back to the horizontal line. Once it meets original line it creates a new line towards first diagonal at more gradual angle. Thus an arrow like shape with tip consisting of 2 nested kites keeps expanding and consuming the line of oscilating xxx. By the generation 2e9 it has processed first 2 smallest of 3 sequences. At ~30e9 it reaches end of third line and inner kite starts to disappear outer kite keeps expanding. 37e9 Inner kite has fully disappeared.
At this point I further bumped RAM so that I can inspect zoomed in look at 1x speed. Now and probably previously what looked like sharp tip of arrow actually is more complicated machinery receiving in stream of gliders processing them and then emitting towards front in a way that reconstructs line of xxx. I am guessing at this point it is reconstructing initial line of xxx.
At ~44e9 first segment of line was reconstructed and machinery started to get torn down? It started to rebuild something near the outer edge of arrow front. And shortly creates new stream of spaceships along the outside of arrow. Most of the time structure consisted of 7+2 similar parallel streams. Some slowdown at ~66e9 probably transition to new phase. Front of kite detaches from central line, outer corner of kite also starts to tear separate and tear down. 88e9 back of kite has fully disappeared leaving only arrow. 95e9 central line start to shrink shorter. 105e9 central line has returned to sequence of xxx. The sides of arrow are still there. 117e9 sides arrow break in half and erase from middle. 133e9 back to single line and start from beginning.
> Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes.
Then occasionally I come across something like this and it feels like all is not lost. Conway's GoL was one of the first C programmes I ever wrote and I've long been distantly fascinated by cellular automata but I had no idea that there was such a depth of research (work, experimentation, collaboration? how do you even describe this kind of collective endeavour?) into GoL lurking out there all these years.
Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like it's 1972 again.
Of course he didn't say that one either: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life
That shares the impressive inefficiencies of the Quest for Tetris project, though. For something that's much more practical to run, and can be programmed to do things like print out the digits of pi in-universe, see
