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I have successfully completed construction of the first (23,5)c/79 spaceship in Conway's Game of Life. That cryptic description means it is the first spaceship to travel up 23 cells and over 5 cells every 79 generations.

Most spaceships in the game travel in one of the simple directions - horizontally, vertically, or slope-1 diagonally. As of December 2014, this is the smallest and fastest known spaceship to travel in an oblique direction. Due to its unusual structure, it has been given the name "Waterbear," in reference to the Tardigrade, a very unusual microorganism.

The design is largely based off of Gabriel Nivasch's humongous Caterpillar spaceship, with a few necessary modifications due to the alternate velocity. Ivan Fomichev found the minimal design for the helix and a procedure by which it could be synthesized, and I took the challenge of coordinating the reactions' outputs to achieve the ten syntheses.

In all, this was my side project for about 3 months. I hope you enjoy!

~bigmacdontcare (Brett Berger)

Made using Golly: http://golly.sourceforge.net/