As always, I'm most concerned with trying to effectively communicate "what it all means" and on that front progress often seems ever slower. A paper I had reasonable hopes for did not make the cut for a home town conference in December. While I'm all too willing to be self-critical about its shortcomings, especially the hard to avoid drift towards story telling at cost to the central argument, I'm also painfully aware of the need to try to take readers beyond what they can see through the paradigmatic scientific blinkers of reductionism and narrow specialisation. I'm concurrently reading Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe which came out of the same edge-of-chaos culture at Santa Fe Institute which my rejected paper continues my long-held concern with, so I must confine myself to simply listing current philosophical headlines before saying a bit more about current explorations.

• Synergy between order and chaos, rather than boundary
• Slow growth imperative, for diversified emergence
• Contingency of historic detail, even with Kauffman's workarounds

I've accumulated enough initial exploration of the rule space to be able to make an initial case that 345/3/6 really is more "interesting" than other comparably simple rules, at least within its neighbourhood. Quite a few of its emergent phenomena can operate in at least some adjacent rules, but they are much less likely to arise naturally or in such variation, being either swamped by more aggressive phenomena or starved through a shortage of viable seeds.

I've also been pushing some of the more interesting patterns towards 200,000 iterations, though it is never really predictable as to which pattern is going to produce the next surprise. However I have basically been drawing on and rarely adding to the 50+ that have been run to 100,000 which is rarely more than an overnight run.

After Whoa S look ahead produced an isolated and thus long-lived diagonally symmetric seed which I had only previously identified while "shell collecting" inside chaotic core, I conceded to finally test all collision reactions between common (space) ships and the moderately common p12 oscillator, the combinations of which are more prolific that anything previously attempted. The reaults included 26 distinct viable asym seeds which have yet to be checked for overlap with known viable seeds, but which do include two which produced rare first mover naked Deltas before iteration 30,000 which made them immediate candidates to run on to 100,000. The first tried then went and produced a never before seen deltoid based on a p480 tail erosion cycle of a 4-wide tagalonged track which conveniently ran out of track just before 100,000 pictured below: