Escape From Life

Perhaps you don't know what a MANGO, SCORPION, BEEHIVE, or PAPER CLIP have in common. Try googling them to find out!

The grids at the bottom have four red 3x3 cells, where you can insert a glider. In glider synthesis, the gliders are required to fly towards each other, so there should only be one way to fill in the gliders to make that happen.

If you run a life simulation on the gliders correctly, they should match the images. But watch your simulator carefully --- there is a bit more going on! What ESCAPES from the simulation?

The escaping gliders should give semaphore letters that you can fit into the grid; this lets you complete a word square.

The small pictures provide additional cluing towards the words. For most of the words this purely acts as confirmation, but you will need the picture in the first row to determine the letter in the top-left square.

The grid cells are themselves tinted, and this is deliberate. To extract, follow the instruction giving by the cell in the southwest, which is the last unused piece of information, and look at the live cells after this.