In a cellular automaton, a gun is a pattern of which the main part repeats periodically, like an oscillator, and which also periodically emits spaceships. There are then two periods that may be considered. There is the period of the spaceship output and the period of the gun itself, which is necessarily a multiple of the spaceship output's period. A gun whose period is larger than the period of the output is a pseudoperiod gun.
In the Game of Life, for every p at least 14 it is possible to construct a glider gun in which the gliders are emitted with period p.[1]
Since guns continually emit spaceships, the existence of guns in Life means that initial patterns with finite numbers of cells can eventually lead to configurations with limitless numbers of cells, a truth that John Conway himself did not believe was possible. Bill Gosper discovered the first glider gun (and, so far, the smallest one found) in 1970, earning $50 from Conway. The discovery of the glider gun eventually led to the proof that Conway's Game of Life could function as a Turing machine. [2]
References
- ^ Game of Life status page, Jason Summers.
- ^ Gardner, Martin (2001). The Colossal Book of Mathematics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 0-393-02023-1.
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