What to watch
- A new glider leaves the gun every 30 generations.
- The two stable blocks act as eater-like boundary objects.
- The central reaction repeats instead of burning out.
Guns
Gosper glider gun
The first known finite pattern with unbounded growth.
The Gosper glider gun changed the status of Life by proving that a finite pattern can emit an infinite stream of moving objects.
- Category
- Guns
- Period
- 30
- Movement
- bounded
- Population
- 36 cells
- Bounding box
- 36 x 9
- Known since
- 1970
How to use it
Use it to introduce glider streams, guns, and unbounded population growth.
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.