Pattern · Gun
The Gosper Glider Gun
A single, finite pattern that never stops producing new ones. The Gosper Glider Gun fires a fresh glider every 30 generations, forever — and in doing so, answered one of the first big open questions about Conway's Game of Life.
The $50 Question
When John Conway published the Game of Life in 1970, he wasn't sure whether every pattern was doomed to either die out or settle into a bounded, unchanging population. He offered $50 to whoever could either prove that no pattern grows forever, or find one that did. A group at MIT, led by Bill Gosper, took the second approach — and within the year, found a pattern built from two interacting "shuttle" oscillators positioned so that each cycle nudges out a complete, independent glider before resetting. Conway paid up.
Why It Matters
Beyond settling the growth question, the glider gun turned out to be a foundational building block. A steady, periodic stream of gliders is exactly what later engineers needed to build logic gates inside Life — a glider stream can represent a repeating signal, and colliding two streams at the right angle can simulate an AND or OR gate. Decades later, that same idea scaled up into full Turing-complete computers built entirely out of Game of Life cells, all tracing back to the same basic firing mechanism Gosper found in 1970.
See It Live
Open the Gosper Glider Gun pre-loaded in Cellscape and press play — give it a few hundred generations and long-exposure rendering to watch the stream of gliders trace a visible, repeating diagonal path across the grid.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented the Gosper Glider Gun?
Bill Gosper, a mathematician at MIT, discovered it in November 1970 as part of a group racing to answer a question John Conway had posed: does anything in the Game of Life grow without bound?
Why was the glider gun such a big deal?
Conway had offered a $50 prize to anyone who could prove or disprove that Life patterns are always bounded in population. The glider gun settled it decisively: a small, finite starting pattern that emits an endless stream of gliders means Life's population can grow forever, with no upper limit.
How often does it fire?
Every 30 generations, the gun's two "shuttle" structures complete a cycle and release one new glider, which then travels away from the gun indefinitely under Conway's B3/S23 rule.
Learn more about Conway's Game of Life in the complete guide, or browse the full pattern & rule gallery.