lightweight spaceship

plural lightweight spaceships

1. cellular automataA particular orthogonal spaceship in Conway's Game of Life, and the smallest such example.

   It's a reaction between a glider and a lightweight spaceship spark, nondestructive to the spaceship (so it can be used in puffers):

   1994 May 14, Paul Callahan, “Louis Howell's question of block clearing in life (simple solution)”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet)

   2 more examples

   To begin with and to be complete, I will list the original spaceships. These are the glider, the lightweight spaceship (LWSS), middleweight spaceship (MWSS), and the heavyweight spaceship (HWSS). These were all found very soon after Life was invented by Conway.

   1992 August 13, David Bell, “Spaceships in Conway's Life (Part 1)”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet)

   The usual non-glider suspects from Conway's Life (lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight spaceships) all fail here due to central 7-neighbor OFF cells.

   2008 May 31, Dave Greene, “Life: B37/S23 - A Chaotic Universe.”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet)

   Synonyms: LWSS