Hacker News Reader

But if you leave those squares all empty it won't keep the original pattern, so I'm not sure how that can be right.

Right -- this discovery is about identical states extending into the past, not into the future.

A Conway's Life pattern that has to stay the same into the indefinite future would be an impenetrable wall, and we don't know of any such thing in the Life rule. It hasn't exactly been proved impossible, but nobody seriously thinks that such a thing exists.

I think it _can_ easily be proven that a finite stable (period 1) impenetrable wall can't exist. It's trivial to find a way to attack the corners, and almost equally trivial to find something that makes a change at any edge.

Right you can break it, but can you prevent its reincarnation?

Well yeah, in fact it would be impossible to rebuild.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com