But at the moment, pretty much all we have is tools to copy and paste rectangular sections of patterns at the cell level -- plus we've got good scripting tools (in Golly) that can be used to string together whatever pieces we might want, but it's up to individual pattern-builders to write those scripts for each specific purpose.
So our "library" is pretty much just the LifeWiki and a few other pattern repositories, and we borrow liberally from existing large constructions -- but when we're building something new, we usually just build flat bitmaps, not anything with built-in annotations or metadata.
Question 2: The thing that's been the most interesting to me in the last decade or so is the increase in collaboration. Projects used to be done by just one person more often than not -- but now a very large fraction of the biggest discoveries are completed via a large group effort over the course of a few weeks or month. One big recent example has been the RCT fixed-cost universal glider synthesis project, which needed contributions from quite a few people to solve all of the tricky little sub-problems:
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Reverse_caber-tosserI'm currently finishing up my OU MSc and the project I picked was specifically around cellular automata - only in this case relating to them calculating any arbitary automatic sequence - which are sequences you can create from finite state machines - that really opened my eyes to the fact these sorts of very, very simple machines can, with the right (and rather complex) setup, be made to do pretty much whatever you want from a computational PoV. In that paper by Rowland and Yassawi they give a constructive proof to calculate the required update rules for a CA that outputs any particular automatic sequence. That itself gives some hints at some ways of deriving the input and rules for these systems to do some particular job. [2]
I know Wolfram often gets dunked on for ego/hubris but in Chapter 11 of a New Kind Of Science he goes into how the Rule 110 CA can be setup to "calculate" (output) other CAs. From there it starts to become a little less mysterious that these systems can generate behaviour you could imagine running on a CPU of some sort.[3]
[1] https://mirror.explodie.org/universality_in_elementary_cellu...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6008
[3] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-11--the-notion-of-co...
Two questions:
1) How are people building things this complex? Are there open source libraries and toolkits for this - building blocks for chunks of functionality that can be assembled?
2) For you, what are the most interesting, impressive and varied things that you've seen with Life? Is it just these increasing levels of complexity, or maybe something else?