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I've been looking at a program gfind, that searches for spaceships in Conway's Game of Life. The documentation says a bunch of stuff about searching De-Bruijin graphs. I couldn't find any useful information about these on the internet, I couldn't figure out how they could be searched, and I'm too broke to get a book. I also looked through David Eppstein's paper [1] on the matter, but it still was too cryptic. I just need an explanation at a high-school level (even though I'm in middle school O_O) of how the algorithm works.

[1] Searching for Spaceships, David Eppstein http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0004003

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    Middle school? The StackExchange terms of service require you to be 13 or older.2012-07-19
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    I am 13. Also, Eppstein's paper is right here: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/00040032012-07-19
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    Your profile says you've been a member for a year and a month... well, I suppose it's okay now.2012-07-19
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    I still don't get why so many people think age is such a good measure of maturity, when really, it's the worst out there...2012-07-19
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    @Qiaochu: He waited until now to post something! :-P2012-07-19
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    @DariusGoad - there are different kinds of maturity, some of which (like physical maturity) are more highly correlated with age than others. Correlation, of course, does not exclude the possibility of infrequent cases which appear to contradict a dominant relationship between factors.2012-07-19
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    @DariusGoad: It's not what many (or few) people think but what the Law says. The Terms of Service were written mostly caring about the Law. And while it may or may not be a good measure of maturity, it's very acccurate and provable.2012-07-19
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    Anyways, what about the topic? The answer to that is kinda what I was after.2012-07-19
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    @Darius: age isn't a good measure of maturity, but it's much easier to measure than anything else you could care to name, so it's much easier to make policies and write legal documents about. My understanding is that there are laws about young people using the internet and StackExchange could possibly get into legal trouble (if not now then possibly at some point in the future) if they didn't have an age policy. There are other concerns here than just whether age is a good measure of maturity.2012-07-19

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