What to watch
- The outside cells all keep legal neighbor counts.
- The empty center remains empty across every generation.
- It appears often in random soups and oscillator catalysts.
Still lifes
Beehive
A six-cell still life with a compact hexagonal outline.
The beehive shows that stability does not require a solid rectangle. The empty center is protected because it never has exactly three live neighbors.
- Category
- Still lifes
- Period
- 1
- Movement
- bounded
- Population
- 6 cells
- Bounding box
- 4 x 3
- Known since
- 1970
How to use it
Use it to explain why empty cells only come alive with exactly three neighbors.
Open the pattern in the lab, reduce the speed, and use single-step mode when a phase change is hard to see. The green preview marks births in the next generation; red outlines mark live cells that will die.