First gliders navigate ever-changing Penrose universe: Now Life enthusiast Adam Goucher has discovered a glider in an aperiodic cellular automaton. Unlike the regular-gridded surface of Life, Goucher's world is a mish-mash of two types of rhombus that completely cover the two-dimensional plane without ever repeating their arrangement. This ever-changing surface is known as a Penrose tiling, after the mathematician Roger Penrose who first dreamed it up. It was seen as a death sentence for gliders: one irregularity could cause the pattern to disappear or veer off-course and loop back on itself...
Goucher's Penrose glider looks quite different – "ribbons" of rhombi keep the glider on a straight line, while a "head" and "tail" give it a sense of direction. This allows it to move through the aperiodic Penrose landscape on an infinite, straight path – the defining feature of a glider.
Goucher's Penrose universe is also vastly more complicated than Life and has several incarnations: in the version featured above, the cells take one of four possible states – shown as different colours, rather than just "live" or "dead".
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