1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
53 comments
·December 3, 2025flufluflufluffy
falcor84
Their free book "Conway’s Game of Life: Mathematics and Construction" is a great starting point - https://conwaylife.com/book/conway_life_book.pdf
culi
That's because it's not "game of life jargon", it's "cellular automata" jargon. Which is a field of math and comes along with a bunch of math jargon from related fields.
dooglius
I searched several of these terms and they are all specifically jargon of game of life enthusiasts, (i.e. search reaults are all on fansites related to game of life) not general cellular automata jargon.
pepinator
mmmh I don't think so. I've read several papers on cellular automata and I don't recognize the terms
IncreasePosts
Once a year or so I find myself on those forums and I'm always astounded how many people there are that dedicate massive amounts of time and brain power to this.
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
H8crilA
> Work started in 2016 and was completed on December 1, 2025.
Almost 10 years of development.
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?
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!
Romario77
[flagged]
tomtomtom777
> I asked AI to explain it to me,
We all know how to do that, but that's not why were here.
alwa
I’m not sure where our guidelines/norms are on this kind of thing, but I get the sense that most of us feel very capable of pasting articles into LLMs ourselves.
What we’re less capable of—and the reason we look to each other here instead—is distinguishing where the LLM’s errors or misinterpretations lie. The gross mistakes are often easy enough to spot, but the subtle misstatements get masked by its overconfidence.
Luckily for us, a lot of the same people actually doing the work on the stuff we care about tend to hang out around here. And often, they’re kind enough to duck in and share.
Thank you in any case for being upfront about it. It’s just that it’d be a shame and a real loss if the slop noise came to drown out the signal here.
wrs
Reading a long explanation on a GoL forum is a great way to experience what it’s like for my spouse to listen to my work conversations on Zoom. This jargon is fantastic.
ekjhgkejhgk
More or less like this?
7373737373
Two of the most fascinating open questions about the Game of Life are in my opinion:
1. What is the behavior of Conway's Game of Life when the initial position is random? Paraphrasing Boris Bukh's comment on the post linked below, the Game of Life supports self-replication and is Turing-complete, and therefore can support arbitrarily intelligent programs. So, will a random initial position (tend to) be filled with super-intelligent life forms, or will the chaos reign?
There exist uncountably infinitely many particular initial configurations out of which a random one may be drawn, which makes this more difficult (a particular infinite grid configuration can be represented as the binary digits (fractional part) of a real number, spiraling outwards from a given center coordinate cell: 0.0000... represents an empty infinite grid, 0.1111... a fully alive infinite grid).
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132402/conways-game-of-li...
2. Relatedly, does a superstable configuration exist? One that continues to exist despite any possible external interference pattern on its border? Perhaps even an expanding one?
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/132687/is-there-any-super...
Legend2440
One problem is that, even though it is turing-complete, many practical operations are very difficult. Patterns tend towards chaos and they tend towards fading out, which are not good properties for useful computation. Simply moving information from one part of the grid to another requires complex structures like spaceships.
You might have better luck with other variants. Reversible cellular automata have a sort of 'conservation of mass' where cells act more like particles. Continuous cellular automata (like Lenia) have less chaotic behavior. Neural cellular automata can be trained with gradient descent.
eig
Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.
pavel_lishin
My understanding (which could be wildly wrong, I only skimmed the thread) is that it's running in a standard 2-dimensional Game of Life grid, it just happens to start out as a 1x3.7B cell line.
sebzim4500
After the first step it isn't 1D any more, so I don't think that visualization is possible
AlotOfReading
It's possible. It'd just be a 3D visualization and more importantly, stupendously huge. If each cell was a cubic millimeter, the shape would be 3700km wide, and stretch 1/3rd of the way to the moon.
adzm
Notably it only fits within a 1 cell high bounding box during at least one of its phases, not all.
syncsynchalt
I'm not a GoLtician myself but I don't think that would be possible under the "standard" rules anyway, except the trivial case of stasis/death.
I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and work it belies. Congrats to those involved!
pohl
Why do you think it would not be possible?
ekjhgkejhgk
I love it that there are people obsessed enough to spend their time on this and our society can support it.
NooneAtAll3
1D spaceship*
glider is a specific spaceship, but name for "moving pattern" is spaceship
rtkwe
Their own wiki points out they're sometimes used interchangably.
pavel_lishin
Hah, and a forum bug further down in the thread:
> Seems there is a bug in the forum, when more people write a post at the same time the post sometimes vanishes.
bezko
“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain
Looking forward to the impending AI and crypto crash and have people run GoL simulations on expensive computer systems like it's 1972 again.
munchler
Off-topic, but like a lot of quotes attributed to Twain, there’s no evidence he said that.
herodoturtle
Can someone please ELI5 what this means? Thanks in advance.
cpfohl
Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles:
Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...
zahlman
As noted by others, the title is mistaken; this is a spaceship, not a glider. (As explained in the Wikipedia article, "glider" refers to a specific 5-cell pattern discovered very early on.)
> So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here
My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to repeat).
NooneAtAll3
spaceship*
glider is one specific spaceship, but name for moving patterns is spaceship
herodoturtle
Thank you ^_^
londons_explore
This seems like a great task as a test for AI.
The result is easily verify-able, yet the techniques to design such a glider are very complex and some might not have been discovered yet.
culi
It's already being done. Has been done for decades now. Definitely wouldn't be a good use of an LLM-type model if that's what you're proposing
If you look at the placement of Journal of Cellular Automata in SciMago's Shape of Science visualization[0] you'll see that it's completely surrounded by machine learning/AI journals
Me: oh cool, this is interesting, I don’t quite understand what exactly that means, let me read the thread to learn more…
The thread: > Replacing ECCA1 by version with step after the direction change could save something like 1% of the ecca1 bits size. Compiling agnosticized program instead of fixed lane program by ecca1 could save something like 1% as well (just guesses). Build of smaller ECCA1 would shorten binary portion, but it would be hardly seen in the ship size.
> Using agnosticized recipe in the fuse portion would definitely reduce its size. Better cordership seed and better salvo for gpse90 would help…
Dear lord I had no idea there’s this much jargon in the game of life community. Gonna be reading the wiki for hours