Context: a knightship is a glider (a structure that translates itself across the Life grid periodically) which moves 2 horizontal units for each 1 vertical unit (or vice-versa if rotated). This is in contrast to e.g. the most popular 3x3 glider which moves diagonally (1 for 1). A knightship is a type of oblique glider - one that doesn't move orthogonally (only horizontal/vertical) or 45º diagonally.

What makes this an elementary knightship is that it isn't built out of smaller discrete components, unlike (for example) the oblique glider Waterbear (http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Waterbear). It's the first elementary oblique glider discovered.

It also happens to move exactly 2 vertical units for each 1 horizontal unit of motion, and carries this out in 6 time-steps (the theoretical minimum). Thus, in some sense it has the simplest movement of any possible knightship.

Here it is for anyone interested (click the image)

http://catagolue.appspot.com/object/xq6_yyocxukcy6gocs20h0a3...

From the comments in the link:

  FlameandFury » March 6th, 2018, 11:52 pm
  
  I don't know when people started seriously searching for 
  knightships, but this is the first elementary spaceship to 
  have a new slope in 48 years. As well, it's been 14 years 
  since the almost-knightship was discovered. Congrats!

Its a long time coming! Congrats!

It's not often that I find a post that, after reading it, I have absolutely no understanding of what I just read.

Usually I have at least some very basic knowledge of the topic at hand.

I guess I should start by reading up on Conway's Game of Life...

The first elementary non-orthogonal, non-diagonal glider has been found.

Small (as of now) summary on the Life wiki:

http://conwaylife.com/wiki/282P6H2V1

That is a pretty amazing result. I enjoy reading the life forum as it has an entire set of nomenclature and vernacular that allow experienced users/explorers/researchers communicate really complex interactions in a concise an unambiguous way. It really drives home the depth of the rabbit hole from something that started so simply and elegantly in the 70's.

  x = 31, y = 79, rule = B3/S23
  4b2o$4bo2bo$4bo3bo$6b3o$2b2o6b4o$2bob2o4b4o$bo4bo6b3o$2b4o4b2o3bo$o9b
  2o$bo3bo$6b3o2b2o2bo$2b2o7bo4bo$13bob2o$10b2o6bo$11b2ob3obo$10b2o3bo2b
  o$10bobo2b2o$10bo2bobobo$10b3o6bo$11bobobo3bo$14b2obobo$11bo6b3o2$11bo
  9bo$11bo3bo6bo$12bo5b5o$12b3o$16b2o$13b3o2bo$11bob3obo$10bo3bo2bo$11bo
  4b2ob3o$13b4obo4b2o$13bob4o4b2o$19bo$20bo2b2o$20b2o$21b5o$25b2o$19b3o
  6bo$20bobo3bobo$19bo3bo3bo$19bo3b2o$18bo6bob3o$19b2o3bo3b2o$20b4o2bo2b
  o$22b2o3bo$21bo$21b2obo$20bo$19b5o$19bo4bo$18b3ob3o$18bob5o$18bo$20bo$
  16bo4b4o$20b4ob2o$17b3o4bo$24bobo$28bo$24bo2b2o$25b3o$22b2o$21b3o5bo$
  24b2o2bobo$21bo2b3obobo$22b2obo2bo$24bobo2b2o$26b2o$22b3o4bo$22b3o4bo$
  23b2o3b3o$24b2ob2o$25b2o$25bo2$24b2o$26bo!

Could someone please kindly explain what all this means?

Here's an idea that I once had about how to visually determine if a program terminates or not:

Convert a program to a Game of Life equivalent program. Observe if there are any run-away gliders. If there are, the original program doesn't terminate.

I love the name Sir Robin, but to me it looks like there is the profile of a cat at the top:

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Knightship

Sort of a tangent, but I'd be curious to know what sort of recent advances there have been in the study or applications of cellular automata. It's been awhile since I picked up Wolfram's "A new kind of science"

How hard would it be to create a gun that produced this new knightship and is that something the community would be interested in doing?

I could imagine it being trivially easy or mind-blowingly hard and have no intuition on what's more likely :)

Given the fact that, often, in mathematics "things" are elegant, I'm rather curious why achieving a "simple" 2x1 move requires such a complex structure. Is there an explanation ?

Wow. I briefly played with searching for these, but was skeptical if there was such a thing. This is one of the greatest discoveries in Life ever. (Though perhaps of little "practical" importance in building other things?)

That was much larger than I was expecting.

Fun fact: Apparently this is based on a discovery by Tom Rokicki who was also able to prove God's number to be 20 (the maximum number of moves to solve the Rubik cube).

Please, someone, post a video or a way to turn that posted code into an animation...

There is already a wikipedia page: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Knightship on Sir Robin.

Perhaps a dumb question: how hard is it to do a "3D" game of life?

Hey I took a video of this and put it on youtube, just so I can show my friends (who I know are too lazy to click on a link, and then click additional buttons)

Is that ok from a copyright perspective and stuff?

It's always nice to see how such a simple set of rules can lead to such complex items. An entire Universe that runs on these rules can probably exist.

Is someone gonna make an x86 simulator on Conway's game of life?

I'd love to know more about the LifeViewer component -- it's wonderful! Is the source code available, and what is the license?

Here's what I've found so far -- it's by Chris Rowett:

http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1026

http://lazyslug.com/lifeview/

Years ago I made a cellular automata AfterEffects plug-in that let you zoom in and pan to follow gliders around. It also had a colorization feature (since the cells were 8 bits and AfterEffects deals with RGBA) that let you sample a colormap of 256 colors from another layer along a line between two animatable points (so you could easily animate natural color gradients from images and video). You could initialize and draw into the cells by overlaying or combining channels of other layers, so you could use the full power of AE to precisely control and visualize the simulation.

It wasn't particularly "interactive" (beyond tweaking control points on the timeline then running it in AfterEffect's preview mode), but you could control all the rule parameters and animate them with the timeline, and apply any AfterEffect transformations and filters to the drawing overlay input or the colorized output.

This video shows the CA AfterEffects plugin, and also the same CA code running in a couple of live interactive editing tools (including SimCity).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCVJ08gK2o8

I've rewritten the CA code in JavaScript, but the current user interface is arcane, and I would like to rewrite it in TypeScript as a module that can plug into some nice interactive playing and editing tool like LifeView.

http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6

https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6

It's really hard to make one user interface or visualization that works well for all rules. A cellular automata viewing and editing tool that supports different rules needs to be deeply customizable.

It turns out that each CA rule needs its own specialized user interface with rule-specific drawing tools, effects, controls and presets for visualizing, playing, painting, explaining, etc.

I wonder if anybody working on a free successor to AfterEffects that runs in a web browser?