| has gloss | eng: A rake in a cellular automaton is a puffer that, instead of leaving behind a trail of debris, emits a stream of spaceships. In Conway's Game of Life, the discovery of rakes was one of the key components needed to form the breeder, the first known patterns in Life in which the number of live cells exhibits quadratic growth. A breeder is formed by arranging several rakes so that the gliders they generate interact to form a sequence of glider guns, the gliders from which fill a growing triangle of the plane. More generally, when a rake exists for a cellular automaton rule, one can often construct puffers which leave trails of many other kinds of objects, by colliding the streams of spaceships emitted by multiple rakes moving in parallel. As David Bell writes, |
