Collisions with A gliders

Although glider collisions and puffer trains are not the real province of de Bruijn diagrams, some information can occasionally be gleaned from the diagrams. For instance ``black hole'' configurations are often interpretable as collisions. Just manually adjusting the coexistence of A and B gliders, it looks like they should begin to collide in the generation-9 de Bruijn diagrams. These are still within computational limits, being 16 times as big as the generation-7 diagrams, but will involve millions of nodes.

However, two kinds of collision are easily described, and are discussed below. Besides the A - B collisions and the A - C collision converting into an F, there is the whole class of collisions by which B gliders extend the E or G gliders, but which has already been incorporated in the foregoing analysis. For A collisions, we can make the following table:

Table 3.2: Collisions between right moving A's and others.

target	residue
B	null
C1	F
C2	C1
C3	C2
D1	C2
D2	D1
E1	D1
E2	E1
E3	C2
F	EBar

Similarly, a table can be constructed for B collisions:

Table 3.3: Collisions between left moving B gliders and others.

target	residue
A	null
C1	C2
C2	D1
C3	E1
D1	E1
D2	EBar + A
E(n)	E(n+1)
F	varied

Besides simple encounters, there is a multitude of collisions between glider polymers, and still more between closely spaced groups of polymers.