Warren Smith wrote:
Another experimental question in ConwayLife you probably already know the answer to: What is the chance that a random configuration swiftly becomes "boring" i.e. trivial to predict the whole future of?
Okay, here's the current status of the distributed search. Out of 78 * 10^9 random 16-by-16 soups, 921421 infinite-growth patterns have occurred. These have all been simple linear growth, and all other patterns have stabilised as a disjoint union of non-interacting oscillators and spaceships. http://catagolue.appspot.com/statistics Results are coming in at roughly 2.5 * 10^9 soups per day from people running the search script in Golly. There are roughly 120 CPUs running this script continuously. It's less exciting to watch than the election, but occasionally interesting things appear. I think that the closest thing to emergence observed so far is the appearance of Bill Gosper's period-46 twin-bees shuttles. We've had 2 cis- and 1 trans- shuttle appear so far: http://catagolue.appspot.com/census/b3s23/C1/xp46 Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher