1-Cell Thick Patterns (2)

“What’s the smallest one cell high pattern to emit a glider?”

asks Macbi in a post at ConwayLife.com

I have modified my script in Perl for Golly, which explored all possible one-cell thick patterns, in order to provide a specific answer to the previous question.

It took five seconds to get the results…

My preliminary approach was to to detect escaping gliders

The shortest patterns that produce escaping gliders are the following two 15-bit patterns:

Pattern #1

Pattern (RLE)

#CXRLE Pos=0,0
x = 15, y = 1, rule = B3/S23
5ob5ob3o!

Initially, there are 13 alive cells. The pattern runs for 522 generations and produces this:

Final population: 150 cells (including four gliders).

Pattern #2

Pattern (RLE)

#CXRLE Pos=0,0
x = 15, y = 1, rule = B3/S23
5ob3o2b4o!

Initially, there are 12 alive cells. As shown in the previous post, the pattern runs for 3183 generations and produces this:

Final population: 1059 cells (including six gliders).