/dev/joe wrote (October 13, 1997):
Some clarifying information for these 2 treasures: For the faster-than-light travel one, the initial and final patterns to be considered are those just after a generation (before a player move), and a null pattern and a pattern with an infinity of cells don't count. The null pattern has no cell cells that can describe any sort of movement, while the infinite pattern is not a valid Life pattern. If you allow infinite patterns you can have FTL travel in normal life, for instance: ..X.........X.........X....... ..X...XXX...X...XXX...X...XXX. ..X.........X.........X....... this infinite pattern of alternating blinkers moves at 5 times light speed. On the cyclic viruses one, I will check on that archive tonight; that probably works, though. (which means that even when I thought I had defined the puzzle precisely enough, I still haven't -- maybe I could add a "no gliders or spaceships" rule?) two-star wrote: > if you use the rotatating glider pattern known as round.lif at the life > pattern archive available at > http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~callahan/patterns/contents.html > > with alternating gliders belonging to species a and b, this works > nicely. This pattern does indeed solve puzzle 2, so two-star has found /dev/joe's pinwheel of many colors. It takes 46 generations for it to reproduce itself with the viruses switched, or 92 generations to completely reproduce the starting pattern. The actual map was: Solve the cyclic viruses patterns puzzle I posted, according to /dev/joe's interpretations of the terms it contains, and send /dev/joe the solution. Through a jumble of snowgod's disease on the parts of both ThinMan and two-star, two-star managed to be the first to complete the conditions of the other map, and he has found the golden glider. The actual map was: Solve the faster-than-light viruses puzzle I posted, according to /dev/joe's interpretations of the terms it contains, and send /dev/joe the solution. I hereby create a trinket worth A$50 named the Silver Glider, with the description "It looks exactly like the golden glider except silver is used in place of gold", and give it to ThinMan as a consolation prize, since he was the first to solve the more difficult proof part of the puzzle. I also thank two-star for pointing out this archive of life patterns; I haven't seen some of the newer stuff there before. [two-star wrote, in one message:] I forgot that I had to provide an example of one that moves at c, when I saw it saying that it is easy to find one that moves at c, my brain skipped ahead. [...] I like o o + where the o's are the initial cells and a cell is placed at the + relative to the o's each turn. [and in the next message:] Bollinger, John C. wrote: > On the other hand, no finite shape can move faster than the speed of > light, despite player intervention of one move per cycle. In order > to do so, there would have to be some generation within the shape's > period during which the shape advances by more than one cell in the > propagation direction. However, grid spaces two or more places in > advance of the shape's leading edge cannot be adjacent to any part of > the shape, and thus could only be populated by a player's PLACE move. > Even this is not sufficient, however, for any new cell PLACEd in such a > position cannot, by definition, have any neighbors among the shape's > populated cells, and thus must die during the generation. It is thus > impossible for any shape to advance more than one grid space per > generation under the specified conditions, which is to say that under > those conditions no shape can move faster than the speed of light. > > ThinMan What he said. Oh, Hubert...