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That's definitely completely true. We can specify the relative positions of the initial gliders at each of the three corners of the RCT pattern in just a few dozen bytes.

But the number that says how far apart those corners are from each other has very roughly half a million digits. The exact number depends on exactly what pattern is being encoded by the RCT pattern -- I think the example construction of Alan Hensel's decimal counter pattern needs somewhere around a 450,000-digit number.

There are some optimizations underway to decrease that number by a few percentage points, but it's always going to be a very big number!




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