[JKCalhoun]

Yeah, I was wondering, with todays computing power, if it were possible to run outrageously large random Life universes and use some sort of software to look for "interesting patterns" (whatever that means).

Or are these "discoveries" being done by hand?

[OscarCunningham]

A lot of discoveries have come from 'soup search' where you start with a random 16 by 16 square and let it evolve. We've run over 156 trillion soups https://catagolue.hatsya.com/statistics. This tends not no produce complicated machines, but rather small components that can then be engineered into larger patterns.