Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles:
As noted by others, the title is mistaken; this is a spaceship, not a glider. (As explained in the Wikipedia article, "glider" refers to a specific 5-cell pattern discovered very early on.)
> So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here
My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to repeat).
what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?
I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,
so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?
Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?
Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?
I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...
Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...