Fan Nickname: Every pattern gets one, such as "block" or "glider". Some of them are shouting out something, such as Sir Robin and the period 19 oscillator cribbage. note because in the card game 19 is the smallest number which is impossible to get
The cellular automata fandom has a significant amount of overlap with the googology, polytope, and conlang communities.
Quite a few Life enthusiasts are also fans of The Huang Twins. Not too surprising, given that Cary in particular made Game of Life and Death and has occasionally featured other references to cellular automata in his videos.
Gustavo Ramos Rehermann's February 2015 prediction of a synthesis of the caterpillar with 386 gliders. This claim was not taken seriously by most people at the time, especially because the caterpillar itself contains thousands of gliders. However, Gustavo was later proven correct in 2018 with the advent of the reverse caber tosser, which showed that the caterpillar could, in theory, be synthesized with no more than 329 gliders.note Assuming it has a glider synthesis to begin with, which is not proven but believed to be highly likely Later improvements to the reverse caber tosser have lowered this number to 15 gliders as of November 2022.
For April Fools' Day in 2018, a random-looking "soup" pattern was advertised to eventually release a spaceship called the loafer, the catch being that the soup did function like so but was found with a special program for the purpose and not with actual randomness. Two years to the day after this joke, a genuinely random soup was found to release a loafer in its evolution.
Mainstream Obscurity: Despite the popularity of Conway's Game of Life as a programming exercise (being taught in many college classes and even more online tutorials), the dedicated fanbase is relatively small, with only a few dozen active users conducting research into it.
Is this known?ExplanationAn extremely common question asked by both newcomers and experienced users regarding patterns they find. The pattern in question can range from a relatively simple object or reaction known since 1970 to a groundbreaking new discovery. Because of this, the question is often parodied in both directions, with users jokingly asking about either extremely basic patterns such as the block or the blinker, or alleged "patterns" that have not yet been proven to exist (e.g., oscillators with previously unknown periods) or have been proven not to exist (e.g., impossibly fast spaceships).
Life Worker Time Deficiency Syndrome.ExplanationA term coined by Dietrich Leithner in 1998 to describe the conundrum of having to divide one's time between Life and life.
Dave Greene's fictitious Life patterns:
IceNine.ExplanationIn a LifeCA email from 2008, Greene claims that a quadratic growth pattern was "found recently with an alternate-universe oscilloscope" with the ability to clear out any ash standing in its way, meaning that any sufficiently large Life universe, after evolving for long enough, will eventually be dominated by the resulting IceNine agar. The pattern grows at a speed of c/137, a reference to a famous approximation of the fine-structure constant. Although most Life enthusiasts agree that a pattern like IceNine probably does not exist, there have been serious efforts to construct patterns which are capable of clearing out random fields of ash, and which take some inspiration from Greene's original description. The name is probably not a Cirno reference.
The Pi-R-Squared spaceship.ExplanationA spaceship that was supposedly found by Tony Honcho Jarnow ("John Horton Conway") while running random soups on a PDP-12 in 1974, only to be lost seconds later by him tripping on a power cable. It consists of two pi-heptominoes and two R-pentominoes, and also moves at a speed of c/137. The name is another mild instance of Genius Bonus, referencing the equation for the area of a circle, although the description of the actual spaceship implies an interpretation of (πr)^2 as opposed to π(r^2). Furthermore, the spaceship has a bounding box of 55x34.
What is "sesame oil"?ExplanationA rather cryptic forum post from 2015 supposedly asking about a pattern named "sesame oil", which does not (yet) exist. No further context was given.
There may be bugs in gfind.ExplanationIn March 2016, a new user joined the ConwayLife forum and immediately posted their discovery of a spaceship moving one cell every ten generations, asking if it was known. It wasn't. The spaceship, later given the name "copperhead", was found while testing a modified version of the search program gfind, and so the user remarked that "there may be bugs in gfind" (sic) which would explain how the copperhead went undiscovered for so many years. It turned out that there weren't any bugs - the original gfind was perfectly capable of rediscovering the copperhead in a reasonable amount of time, but no one thought to search for it because they assumed searching for a spaceship with such a high period would be too difficult.
Smaller version of a pond.ExplanationIn April 2017, a new user posted to the forums claiming to have discovered a brand new still life described as such. It was actually just the tub, one of the simplest possible still lifes. "Smaller version of a pond" still lives on as a redirect to "tub" on LifeWiki as of October 2022.
Very very very very boat.ExplanationAn erroneous wiki edit made in July 2017 that went unnoticed for over a year and later made its way onto Catagolue, due to it scraping data from LifeWiki.
The magical(?) box.ExplanationIn 2019, a text box was added to the website Catagolue where users could submit glider syntheses (and later glider guns) to be automatically parsed and added to the database. It was almost immediately referred to as "magic" as it made the cataloging of glider syntheses significantly less of a headache. Although this was meant figuratively, an argument ensued about whether or not the submission box really qualified as "magic".
Rule 2.ExplanationRule 2 of the Conwaylife Lounge is that foul language is disallowed in most circumstances (although exceptions are made for things like "Brainfuck" since swearing is inherent to the name and censoring it would just lead to confusion). Swearing is therefore often censored as "rule2".
All the nickname trends that have appeared on the Conwaylife Lounge Discord server over the years:
"(Pattern)spawn"ExplanationIn late 2018, many people changed their Discord nicknames in reference to the user Blinkerspawn, usually by replacing "blinker" with some other Life pattern.
Spoonerisms.ExplanationIn April 2019, Discord moderator dani changed her nickname to "Scom Tott", leading to many other users spoonerizing other famous people's (or sometimes their own) names. Some also changed their profile pictures accordingly.
"Catererer"Explanation"Caterer" is both the name of a Life pattern and the name of the Discord bot used to generate GIFs of patterns. The trend of adding extraneous -ers to one's nickname caught on in 2019 and 2020.
"(Letter)for(Word)"ExplanationIn mid-2020, several people modeled their nicknames after user AforAmpere, leading to names like "SforSaka" and "DforDanielle".
"#1 switch engine fan"ExplanationAlso started by dani, who found a series of small quadratically-growing patterns involving switch engines in March and April 2022.
"ihate(pattern)s"ExplanationStarted in mid-2022, after user "ihatecorderships" liked a post from 2017 featuring a new Cordership.
Misaimed Fandom: Conway's original goal when creating the Game of Life was merely to create a simple ruleset that nonetheless exhibited certain complex behavior. Despite this, it (along with other similar cellular automata) has been picked up by some people as evidence to support various pseudoscientific theories about the Real Life universe, such as that reality is a simulation and/or that it obeys a set of cellular automaton rules at the smallest scale.
Quicksand Box: With absolutely no objective, it is entirely up to the player to decide what they want to try and build within the constraints of the game. But without external guides, good luck figuring out what can be built, other than basic patterns like still lifes, oscillators, and spaceships.
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