More on puffers in high-count Life variants
The "pond puffer" I mentioned earlier for the B37/S23 rule also exists in B37/S238, along with the other puffer. (In cellular-automaton terminology, a puffer is something that moves along leaving debris behind, and a breeder is, broadly, a thing that makes things that make things; in this case it's a modified puffer that shoots puffers that leave debris.) I've found nice precursor patterns for both of them made of pairs of R-pentominoes that look like impending Atari 2600 plane crashes (if you have Golly you can select the grids and copy and paste them in directly):
puffer 1, B37/S23 or B37/S238
O.....O
OOO.OOO
.O...O.
puffer 2 (pond puffer), B37/S23 or B37/S238
O.........O
OOO.....OOO
.O.......O.
In regular Life, they both die out without creating so much as a glider.
But I haven't found a way to perturb that precursor to puffer 1 to get the naturally occurring B37/S238 breeder that is a perturbation of puffer 1. The smallest precursor of the breeder I've been able to find is this:
breeder, B37/S238
...........O
...........O
...........O
............
............
............
..OOO.OOO...
OO..O.O..OO.
.OOO...OOO..
..O.....O...
The bottom part by itself becomes puffer 1.
Conway Life has lots of puffer and breeder patterns, but none that occur "naturally" as common protrusions of random soups. This also seems to be the case in B23/S238. It's tempting to conjecture that there is some causal connection between the existence of common natural puffers in B237/S23 and B237/S238, and the fact that sufficiently large soups in these automata always become ever-growing chaos. But I don't know if there is one, aside from both facts arising from high-number birth and survival rules.
ikkyu2 asked if all of this work was for something, or if it was studied simply for its own sake. Really it's the latter; this is recreational, or, if you prefer, pure mathematics. Researchers in various fields do occasionally value cellular automata as a kind of very simple idealized "physics" that you can use to prove points about how little you need to set up a system that does X or Y; that was more or less what von Neumann was up to back in 1948. Occasionally someone like Ed Fredkin or Stephen Wolfram insists that they have some sort of cosmic significance. And, while I haven't used it, there seems to be a small music sequencer for the iPhone that uses the Wireworld CA as its control architecture.
But mostly people study them because they're kind of cool, like small natural universes that you can study in detail with readily available equipment.
puffer 1, B37/S23 or B37/S238
O.....O
OOO.OOO
.O...O.
puffer 2 (pond puffer), B37/S23 or B37/S238
O.........O
OOO.....OOO
.O.......O.
In regular Life, they both die out without creating so much as a glider.
But I haven't found a way to perturb that precursor to puffer 1 to get the naturally occurring B37/S238 breeder that is a perturbation of puffer 1. The smallest precursor of the breeder I've been able to find is this:
breeder, B37/S238
...........O
...........O
...........O
............
............
............
..OOO.OOO...
OO..O.O..OO.
.OOO...OOO..
..O.....O...
The bottom part by itself becomes puffer 1.
Conway Life has lots of puffer and breeder patterns, but none that occur "naturally" as common protrusions of random soups. This also seems to be the case in B23/S238. It's tempting to conjecture that there is some causal connection between the existence of common natural puffers in B237/S23 and B237/S238, and the fact that sufficiently large soups in these automata always become ever-growing chaos. But I don't know if there is one, aside from both facts arising from high-number birth and survival rules.
ikkyu2 asked if all of this work was for something, or if it was studied simply for its own sake. Really it's the latter; this is recreational, or, if you prefer, pure mathematics. Researchers in various fields do occasionally value cellular automata as a kind of very simple idealized "physics" that you can use to prove points about how little you need to set up a system that does X or Y; that was more or less what von Neumann was up to back in 1948. Occasionally someone like Ed Fredkin or Stephen Wolfram insists that they have some sort of cosmic significance. And, while I haven't used it, there seems to be a small music sequencer for the iPhone that uses the Wireworld CA as its control architecture.
But mostly people study them because they're kind of cool, like small natural universes that you can study in detail with readily available equipment.