Almost everything was unclear to me, but then I'm not familiar with the Game of Life lingo. Perhaps it would make sense to write a version that the educated public can understand, even without any Life background?

Funny. I first saw life over 40 years ago. I saw some crazy objects creates in my college days. I've seen occasional articles about breakthroughs over the years. Understanding gliders and spaceships has been my foundation to grok everything since. Being able to think in the abstract was a key to understanding this article for me, but without a few concrete foundational concepts... I stopped a few times reading it to laugh at how absurdly abstract and full of jargon it is. Completely meaningless techno-babble to the uninitiated. How much of my own specialization sounds so opaque to outsiders? Maybe all of it ;-)

I would say "the educated public" is already the target audience for my blog. Game of life topics are notoriously hard to disentangle from their jargon, and I went to some effort here but needed to balance that against the goal to remain accurate.

My hope is that by reading only the amount of background on the blog already in the Waterbear post (referenced immediately in the introduction), you have all you need to grok the post. But that's certainly an optimistic hope, and maybe unfounded.

This is a very fine piece of writing, communicating the excitement well! I could almost forget I didn't understand all the details. Which is the goal of popular science/maths writing, I guess - to communicate what something looks and feels like at the coal-face to people who don't know all the details, sufficiently that they can share and appreciate the excitement. And bewilderment - How the hell does that super-complicated epic construction come out of 15 gliders?!

I have read quite a bit about GoL before over the years, programmed and experimented with it and many variants etc But never tried to build a.. well, it's high level programming in GoL isn't it, or like building UNIX tools in GoL and doing cool things with complex combinations of them. I had my mouth open in amazement reading it. Bunch of maniacs. This is an extreme sport. Thank you!

How much of advanced GoL is intuition and genius you were born with and how much is math/logic anyone can learn with enough time?

Definitely worth trying to learn! As with most topics, it starts out seeming hard to grasp, and then you start naming things and recognizing them. What looks like jargon to an outsider is just a compressed way of communicating. The people in the community are smart and tend to compress their ideas really far which makes the jargon even more extreme.

Advanced gol is just getting past that first hurdle of understanding the densely compressed info behind the jargon. And it doesn't ever need to be done for all of the concepts. You can be versed in just one. I started out in a super specialized corner in self constructing spaceships. That said I'm a bit of a whiz in other areas so I can't be used as evidence that it works for everyone..

I think the biggest prerequisite for getting good at "advanced GoL" is just an unreasonable amount of patience.

Probably I'm a good case in point. I'm definitely not a particularly clever mathematician, but it seems like it's possible to understand any new Life technology just by tinkering with the pieces for long enough.

If anyone wants to follow along with that kind of learning process, just start working through the Life textbook that kryptiskt mentioned. (Full disclosure, I'm one of the authors.)

To be fair, that's the definition of jargon. Using domain specific language is something that's universal - it's a compression technique you see any domain where there's a need to communicate dense information. Abstraction affords precision, not ambiguity.

I just want to say that I love everything the GoL community has built and discovered over the years. Big crazy things like this always fill my heart with awe and wonder.

Even though in my life, I can't make the time for doing something on the grandiose scale required, I can live vicariously through reading about your sheer dedication and intellectual effort expended.

I can recommend the recent book "Conway's Game of Life: Mathematics and Construction" (downloadable free at https://conwaylife.com/book/), it starts gently and builds up to these kind of constructions (minus what has been discovered in the last year or so).

Do you see this as a form of geometric compression in the future?

It's a bit hard to see how this RCT trick could be useful for reducing anything besides the number of gliders.

RCT is basically one very unreasonable end of a wide spectrum: you can use a very small number of gliders to build something, as long as you're content to have the construction take a ridiculously long time. Conversely, you can build that same thing in a lot less time, but it will take a lot more gliders.

Also, even if the maximum number of gliders is fixed (15), that does not imply any limit on the amount of information needed to store their positions.

The glider positions might very well require more storage than the desired pattern itself.

That's definitely completely true. We can specify the relative positions of the initial gliders at each of the three corners of the RCT pattern in just a few dozen bytes.

But the number that says how far apart those corners are from each other has very roughly half a million digits. The exact number depends on exactly what pattern is being encoded by the RCT pattern -- I think the example construction of Alan Hensel's decimal counter pattern needs somewhere around a 450,000-digit number.

There are some optimizations underway to decrease that number by a few percentage points, but it's always going to be a very big number!

No questions, just "zig" saying hi :) Nice article.