So, I had the weirdest string of events I have ever had. Some important context:
In the cellular automaton
Conway's Game of Life, there are patterns (arrangements of cells) that change their shape but return to their original form some number of generations (ticks) later, called oscillators. This number is known as the oscillator's period. All periods except 19 and 41 were known until recently. In fact, it was suspected by some prominent members of the community (yes there's a vibrant community that pores over this stuff, I'm too dumb for this but I stay in touch with discoveries) that they simply don't exist. "Omniperiodicity", meaning that all oscillators in a cellular automaton are known, was a major problem in CGOL.
So, on July 13, I wrote in my sci-fi novel, set in a Space Age future in 2230, that a p19 oscillator has not been discovered by then, in a casual conversation, and the character saying it expresses his belief that it won't ever be discovered, considering 200 years of throwing computational power at it.
Literally the goddamn next day, a p19 was discovered.Okay, fine, weird coincidence and I was shocked. But I changed it to p41, surely this was a fluke. p41 didn't have any real avenues for its discovery, as
a partial result was shown to be difficult to impossible to stabilize.
All was well.
Literally a motherfucking week after, a p41 was discovered. What the actual fuck, was my reaction.Everyone knows about sci-fi failing to predict the future, but the "future" that was less than a week after it was written?!?! TWICE?!?! I'm utterly flabbergasted by this. Like what?
(I changed it to "indestructible still-life". Feels like something that's nigh impossible to prove
doesn't exist, but feels hard enough that people will still be trying to crack that nut 200 years in the future and, in my setting, with distributed computing all over the Terran Federation of ~120 colonized worlds.)