In Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata, a spacefiller is a pattern that spreads out indefinitely, eventually filling the entire space with a

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, m ...

pattern. It typically consists of three components: stretchers that resemble spaceships at the four corners of the pattern, a growing boundary region along the edges of the pattern, and the still life in the interior pattern. It resembles a

breeder A breeder is a person who selectively breeds carefully selected mates, normally of the same breed to sexually reproduce offspring with specific, consistently replicable qualities and characteristics. This might be as a farmer, agriculturalist, or ...

in that both types of patterns have a quadratic growth rate in their numbers of live cells, and in both having a three-component architecture. However, in a breeder the moving part of the breeder (corresponding to the stretcher) leaves behind a fixed sequence of

glider gun In a cellular automaton, a gun is a pattern with a main part that repeats periodically, like an oscillator, and that also periodically emits spaceships. There are then two periods that may be considered: the period of the spaceship output, and ...

s which fill space with gliders, moving objects (gliders or spaceships) rather than still life patterns. With a spacefiller, unlike a breeder, every point in the space eventually becomes part of the space-filling still life pattern.

References

Cellular automaton patterns {{Comp-sci-stub