[pkilgore]

So it starts as a line, explodes into a huge 2D complex mess, and eventually, after many generation, returns to form the same 3.7B cells long line?

That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.

Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!

[layer8]

See here: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040&start...

It’s also a relatively sparse line, as the number of live cells is less than a hundredth of the line’s extent: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unidimensional_spaceship_1

[Retr0id]

I'm barely able to follow, but this part was fun:

> The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.

[H8crilA]

> Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1, 2025.

Almost 10 years of development.

[IAmBroom]

Development, idle hacking when someone got bored at work; potato, potahto...

[Cthulhu_]

This kind of thing is many times more complicated and involved than my day job, I wouldn't call it "idle" if I were to do it.

[dkural]

Only about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.

[levocardia]

Game of life indeed!

[2snakes]

Also share about 60 percent with bananas.

[tantalor]

How many steps is the period? How far does it travel in that period? What direction does it go? Does it clean up after itself?

[layer8]

As the wiki page states, the period is 133076755768, and it moves by two cells in that time. Spaceships in GoL by definition don’t leave anything behind, they produce the exact same configuration, just shifted across the grid.

Given that it starts as a single line, it is symmetric in the axis implied by that line, and hence can’t possibly move diagonally or orthogonal to the line. Hence it moves in the direction of the line.

[tantalor]

Thanks!

I was a bit confused by that wiki page because it says "Direction Orthogonal" but like you said that can't be.

[layer8]

Yeah, “orthogonal” here just means “not diagonal”. Since GoL configurations don’t have a distinguished orientation (you can rotate and/or mirror them however you like), it wouldn’t make sense to specify up/down/left/right, at least not without first fixing an (arbitrary) orientation.

[scotty79]

Thank you for this description. I thought it's a glider for some 1 dimensional cellular automata system.

[kevincox]

Yes, that was my first reading as well. I thought "((1D Conway's Life) glider) found" but it is "(1D (Conway's Life glider)) found".