Talk:Conway's Game of Life
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Smallest undecidable seed?[edit]
What I was looking for when I visited the article was a link or lead towards the smallest known undecidable seed for the game. Or is it impossible to know for sure if any particular seed is actually undecidable? In that case, I guess I'd try to reword the question in terms of "How big is the smallest seed which is suspected of being undecidable?" Shanen (talk) 02:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
- I don't think your question makes sense if by size you mean the area of its bounding box. For any size you name, there are only a finite number of patterns, all of which have some fixed fate that can be stated by an algorithm, for instance one that hardcodes a list of these patterns and their fates. So nothing can be undecidable. On the other hand, if you mean the number of live cells, it's at most 65: every glider-constructible pattern can be constructed using at most 15 carefully-placed gliders, and that includes families of patterns (not individual patterns!) with undecidable fates. See e.g. the note in https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Patterns_constructible_by_a_given_number_of_gliders . But that's not a reliable source by Wikipedia standards, so we would need something better than that before we can state anything about this in our article. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
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