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Comment by OscarCunningham | Hacker News Reader

There exists an 'orphan' pattern that cannot arise in any configuration after the first generation. When we look at large patterns, the proportion of them that contain an orphan tends to 1.

On the other hand the smallest known orphan is 12 by 8, and we also know that all still lifes (unchanging patterns) with up to 21 cells can be built.

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21 cells would be a 3 by 7?

Gardens of Eden can be arbitrary patterns, whereas only the 21-cell still lifes are known to be constructible.

Ok, but what do you mean by a "still life" of 21 cells? Is that a rectangle in a larger field or is it an arbitrary set of cells?

A pattern with 21 live cells in any bounding box.

Thanks for answering!

(Not just any such pattern, though -- a still life also means that it doesn't change when you evolve it according to Life rules.)

Also we can only do the strict still lives (i.e. those which are connected https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Still_life#Strict_still_lifes). We can't necessarily put down a 10-cell still life and an 11-cell still life near to each other.

Heh, not necessarily, that's true, in the sense that all the possible arrangements haven't been tested and shown to be constructible.

On the other hand, pseudo-still-life and quasi-still-life arrangements are much easier to construct on average than strict still lifes with the same number of cells.

I think the consensus is that someone could figure out how to construct any given stable 21-bit configuration. The non-strict cases are just a bit too numerous and not interesting enough, so nobody has gone through and formally checked them off the list.

If you want to see what these 21-bit still lifes look like, their glider construction recipes are all stored online, on Catagolue (no, that's not a misspelling):

https://catagolue.appspot.com/census/b3s23/synthesis-costs/x...

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