Re: Conway's Game of Life (cellular automata)

[Michael Bogomolny <bogo@cs.utexas.edu>]

| In more detail, Ian Stewart's book "The Collapse of Chaos" describes
| Conway's Game of Life and claims that a "glider gun" is periodic with
| period 30, with the additional feature that the "glider gun" shoots
| out a stream of pulses diagonally (down & to the right). 

Generation 29 is the same as generation 89, 30 as 90, etc.
Generation 29 is *not* the same as generation 59, due to the "offshoot".
So why wouldn't you say that after 28 generations it stabilizes
to a cycle with period 60?

-bogo