Talk:Glider (Conway's Game of Life)

New image

Would anyone have a problem with me replacing the current image with the one located here: [1]? It seems the one I linked to there follows the image format of the main Conway's Game of Life page better than the current image. JokeySmurf (talk) 20:28, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Terminology

There's at least two separate definitions for the word Glider in the jargon of The Game of Life. "The Glider" is the 3x3 5 cell pattern and refers usually to that specific pattern. "A Glider" is synomymous with "a spaceship".

This article uses both definitions in the same context and is a little confusing. This paragraph uses the second definition:

Going by the technical definition, the number of gliders is possibly unlimited, of which the familiar 5-bit one is the only one that naturally occurs. Some consist of 1 or more gliders towing & inducting raw matter (Orion, etc.) and others do not have towing gliders,but satisfy the definition of a glider nevertheless .Conversely, diagonal period 4 spaceships towed by gliders do not necessarily have glide-reflected half-periods (swan, big "glider", etc.)

But the paragraph before that uses the first definition of glider:

Gliders can also be collided with other patterns with interesting results. For example, if two gliders are shot at a block in just the right way, the block will move closer to the source of the gliders. If three gliders are shot in just the right way, the block will move farther away. This "sliding block memory" can be used to simulate a counter, which would be modified by firing gliders at it. It is possible to construct logic gates such as AND, OR and NOT using gliders. One may also build a pattern that acts like a finite state machine connected to two counters. This has the same computational power as a universal Turing machine, so, using the glider, the Game of Life is theoretically as powerful as any computer with unlimited memory and no time constraints: it is Turing complete.

Also, the light-weight spaceship will occur naturally as well (very rarely), so the paragraph is inaccurate. 98.22.185.16 (talk) 15:07, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Merger Proposal

This article could be merged with Spaceship (cellular automaton). The scope is the same and The Glider qualifies as a spaceship in Conway's Game of Life. The Spacehip article even covers most of this article's material on glider collisions and sliding blocks. 98.22.185.16 (talk) 15:18, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

• I'm not in favor of such a merger. The glider is a very special type of spaceship, arguably the most famous, with its own unique history. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 10:45, 10 May 2014 (UTC)