Today I read a paper titled “Searching for Spaceships”
The abstract is:
We describe software that searches for spaceships in Conway’s Game of Life and related two-dimensional cellular automata.
Our program searches through a state space related to the de Bruijn graph of the automaton, using a method that combines features of breadth first and iterative deepening search, and includes fast bit-parallel graph reachability and path enumeration algorithms for finding the successors of each state.
Successful results include a new 2c/7 spaceship in Life, found by searching a space with 2^126 states.