Methuselah patterns, glider guns, emergent complexity from B3/S23
Gen: 0
Pop: 0
Peak: 0
Speed: 0 gen/s
Pattern:
Speed: 10 gen/s
Zoom: 3px
Conway's Game of Life (1970): cells live or die by rules B3/S23 — born with exactly 3 live neighbors, survives with 2 or 3. Despite simplicity, it is Turing-complete. Methuselahs are small initial patterns that take hundreds of generations to stabilize. The R-pentomino (5 cells) runs for 1103 generations. Glider guns (Gosper 1970) were the first patterns producing unbounded growth, disproving Conway's conjecture. Click to draw cells.