Challenges
The open problems of Live Free or Die as the 2008 site listed them.
This is a historical list, not a live offer. In 2008 the site promised “eternal gratitude, naming rights, and a place of glory on this web site”
to anyone who solved one of these; the 2013 wiki added cash prizes. This restoration no longer tracks new discoveries, and neither offer stands today.
Only broad categories that had not been discovered are shown. Bold entries are the most significant. This is the list as it stood in July 2008. Several have since been solved; see the notes below.
General objects
- Objects of undiscovered periods: p10, p11, p13, p14, p15, etc.
- Oscillators of undiscovered periods: p7, p8, p9, p16, p24, etc.
- Spaceships or puffers of undiscovered periods: p2, p7, p9, p28, etc.
- Guns
- Reusable reflectors for moons or other spaceships
- Eaters for spaceships other than moons
- Signal circuitry analogous to Herschel conduits in Conway’s Life
- “Clean” (i.e. non-chaotic) breeders or spacefillers
- “Knightships” or puffers with similar movement
- Spaceships or puffers of unknown speeds: c/3, c/4, c/6, etc.
Live Free or Die-specific objects
- Puffers that produce rare objects: levers, Cecil B. DeMilles, etc.
- Undiscovered logic gates built with “hot sand” (see Logic gates for known gates)
- Moon syntheses for significant objects (preferably to be usable with rakes)
- New implementations of anchor track flotilla technology
- Stabilizers for wicks and other oscillator components that function identically in the Seeds universe
- Dot-constructed technology, i.e. stable eaters, reflectors etc.
Since then
The 2013 wiki kept this page going, adding cash prizes in July 2014: $25 for a spaceship of a new speed, $25 for any moon reflector, and $50 for a stable moon reflector. Several of the 2008 challenges have since been answered:
- A gun: the p4 moon laser, by Matthias Merzenich (August 2012). A much smaller p5 moon gun followed from Arie Paap in August 2016.
- c/3 and c/4 orthogonal spaceships: the wasp ship (Michael Simkin, October 2014, which won a prize) and the beachcomber ship (Josh Ball, July 2012).
- Period 10: the decade ship (Paul Tooke, 2012), then p10 puffers (Arie Paap, 2015).
- p2 rakes and puffers: Josh Ball’s c p2 backrake (July 2014) and the flicker rake (Nora Brown, 2015).
- c/2 rakes: Josh Ball’s c/2 backrake (July 2014), then the buffalo rake, horned rake and hippo rake (by 2015).
- Breeders: the first, an MMS breeder, by Arie Paap (March 2015). Game of Life Fun built the first MMM breeder in May 2025.
- Universality: a W110 unit cell, emulating Rule 110 (2020, on LifeWiki).
As of the wiki’s Challenges page in April 2015, no moon reflector, knightship, spacefiller or replicator was known, and there were no objects at period 11, 13, 14 or 15.