by Karliss | 2025-12-04 01:12:50+00:00
Golly with hashlife algorithm is quite amazing. You can simulate and visualize quite a bit of it.

Summary: In the end I was able to go through full period with the memory limit set to 35GB of memory. Most of the time all the action happens in 1+3x2 straight lines with different angles no more than 100 cells wide each. There were multiple distinct phases. Some one could definitely make an interesting visualization zooming in one the distinct regions at different stages of progression. General shape is horizontal line, <- shaped arrow, arrow with kite head, arrow with 2 nested kites, 2 giant nested kites, kite, arrow, horizontal line.

At first I was able to simulate first 15*10^9 generations quite quickly. And you could see some of initial stages. During first 2e9 generations it was using only 500MB of memory, somewhere between 2e9-4e9 it started to slow down. After bumping the memory it limit to 16G it was able to spedup again until ~15e9.

Initially it looks like 3 strings xxx. First one the shortest, second slightly longer and third even longer. Pattern xxx oscilates between horizontal and vertical giving stable form to store information.

Shortest string starts to get consumed from right to left.At some point it emits 2 gliders diagonally to the up/left and down left. After a while there are 2 vertical spaceships which collide with 2 diagonal gliders. After a bit more it starts to emit stream of gliders to the up right direction with overall shape being like arrow. At the back of arrows the gliders start to build a structure for next stage. The constructed structure starts creating bigger stream in the up right direction which in turn starts emiting stream down right back to the horizontal line. Once it meets original line it creates a new line towards first diagonal at more gradual angle. Thus an arrow like shape with tip consisting of 2 nested kites keeps expanding and consuming the line of oscilating xxx. By the generation 2e9 it has processed first 2 smallest of 3 sequences. At ~30e9 it reaches end of third line and inner kite starts to disappear outer kite keeps expanding. 37e9 Inner kite has fully disappeared.

At this point I further bumped RAM so that I can inspect zoomed in look at 1x speed. Now and probably previously what looked like sharp tip of arrow actually is more complicated machinery receiving in stream of gliders processing them and then emitting towards front in a way that reconstructs line of xxx. I am guessing at this point it is reconstructing initial line of xxx.

At ~44e9 first segment of line was reconstructed and machinery started to get torn down? It started to rebuild something near the outer edge of arrow front. And shortly creates new stream of spaceships along the outside of arrow. Most of the time structure consisted of 7+2 similar parallel streams. Some slowdown at ~66e9 probably transition to new phase. Front of kite detaches from central line, outer corner of kite also starts to tear separate and tear down. 88e9 back of kite has fully disappeared leaving only arrow. 95e9 central line start to shrink shorter. 105e9 central line has returned to sequence of xxx. The sides of arrow are still there. 117e9 sides arrow break in half and erase from middle. 133e9 back to single line and start from beginning.