You see this bad boy? A person called mvr, on a Conway's Game of Life discord server, found this today. It's what's called a period 19 oscillator, which is cool because it's the first ever discovered! Oscillators of many periods have been found before, but never one with 19 steps.
Big news for people who really like repeatedly applying a set of two rules on an infinite grid!
we DO like repeatedly applying a set of two rules on an infinite grid
it's remarkable that Conway's Life hasn't been fully explored yet
It can't be, can it? It's Turing-complete, so AIUI fully exploring it would be equivalent to exploring every possible computer program.
Yeah, something so simple like a particular low-period oscillator sounds like something so basic someone's had to have found it by now, but nope! The depth of it truly is remarkable.
holy heck, we're now one p41 away from omniperiodicity being proven for conway's game of life. we're so close to knowing for certain that CGoL has repeating patterns of every period
I know right?? It's teeny tiny. How did we miss something so teeny tiny for like 20 years
I'm surprised that this didn't get found earlier through exhaustive search! I know a lot of weird-period oscillators got found that way.
The oscillating area looks pretty enclosed. Is it possible to send a signal from it without perturbation?
