What to watch
- Run it at moderate speed and watch the live population collapse.
- The reaction is long-lived but not stable.
- It is a compact benchmark for extinction behavior.
Methuselahs
Diehard
A small pattern famous for eventually vanishing completely.
Diehard is useful because it looks lively for a long time but leaves no ash. It separates activity from survival.
- Category
- Methuselahs
- Period
- Dies after 130 generations
- Movement
- bounded
- Population
- 7 cells
- Bounding box
- 8 x 3
- Known since
- 1993
How to use it
Use it to show that a noisy reaction can still be finite.
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.