Glue's slow-salvo block-move table

-- Starting out this weblog with a small experiment. I'm posting a few intermediate results from Paul Chapman's 'Glue' project, which involves a recursive enumeration of still lifes and constellations that can be produced from a single block in B3/S23 Life by a salvo of slow gliders.

[In the unlikely event that most of this terminology is still unfamiliar to you, but you're still interested for some reason: a salvo is a fleet of gliders all traveling in the same direction; a slow glider salvo is one in which the phase and spacing of the incoming gliders doesn't matter, as long as they are sufficiently far apart. For definitions of those terms, see Stephen Silver's Life Lexicon.]

Here is a table of the number of gliders needed to move a block by a given X, Y distance:


The actual recipes can be found here, in an only slightly mysterious format.

Update 2005-12-28: A new version of Glue is currently in progress, which allows for p2 intermediate patterns as well as stable patterns to be considered. Will post more data when it's available.

Update 2016-11-8: A table of block-move recipes allowing intermediate period-2 target patterns can be found here [conwaylife.com forums].