probably old news to you all, but new to me.... First replicating creature spawned in life simulator 16 June 2010 by Jacob Aron New Scientist Magazine issue 2765. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627653.800-first-replicating-creatur... "Gemini" is described here, it can be regarded as a spaceship with very general velocity vector: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini Number of cells 846278 Bounding box 4217807x4220191 Period 33699586 The new copy is offset by: (5120,1024) This as definitely an example of "intelligent design" :) The designer was Andrew J. Wade. Then the "geminoid replicator" was built, which creates an offset copy of itself, but the original copy is still there (unlike gemini, where the original is destroyed) and this was implemented in 14826990x14826908 box using 290096 live cells, and the replication takes 237228340 ticks. A gzip compressed description fits in 26.6 kbytes. Apparently the designer was Dave Green (?). Using this technology it is comparatively easy to build quadratic-growth patterns, etc etc, you could program it to create a spatial -- or space-time -- pattern which, viewed at a large enough scale of space and/or time, looks like anything that is algorithmically describable. Apparently, the geminoid replicator's core processor fits in only about a 600x600 box with about 16000 live cells; the rest is just "microcode." Even that 16000, however, is far more complexity than could have ever been expected to arise naturally in the observable physical universe. http://conwaylife.com/ links to an enormous amount of ConwayLife research, it is incredible how much they've done. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)