What to watch
- The five cells remain unchanged after every tick.
- It is a useful comparison point for the block, tub, and loaf.
- It appears in many still-life catalogues and synthesis examples.
Still lifes
Boat
The only five-cell still life and a common small ash object.
The boat is compact enough to inspect by hand, yet asymmetric enough to show that still-life stability is about neighbor counts rather than visual regularity.
- Category
- Still lifes
- Period
- 1
- Movement
- bounded
- Population
- 5 cells
- Bounding box
- 3 x 3
- Known since
- 1970
How to use it
Use it when teaching the common still-life family before moving into larger ash objects.
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.