Solution to Escape From Life
We start by identifying all the images and filling in the blanks. As hinted by the title, these are all various patterns in Conway's Game of Life. Most of them are considered common patterns and listed on, e.g. bottom of the Catagolue. (The one exception is the rare snake with feather.)
Image | Word | Index | Letter |
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Pond | 4 | D |
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Mango | 5 | O |
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Loaf | 4 | F |
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Scorpion | 3 | O |
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Tub | 2 | U |
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Eater 1 | 5 | R |
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Long boat | 4 | G |
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Block | 2 | L |
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Snake with feather | 7 | I |
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Toad | 4 | D |
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Beehive | 2 | E |
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Pulsar | 6 | R |
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Shillelagh | 1 | S |
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Half-bakery | 10 | Y |
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Blinker | 4 | N |
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Boat | 4 | T |
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Ship | 2 | H |
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Ship-tie | 7 | E |
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Moose antlers | 4 | S |
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Paperclip | 8 | I |
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Integral sign | 9 | S |
This gives us the cluephrase DO FOUR GLIDER SYNTHESIS. This means we should fill in the red squares in the images at the bottom to get gliders and see what hapens when they collide. The two corner cells of the glider are filled in, and as it turns out, there is exactly one way to orient the glider so that those corner squares match up and the glider flies towards the center of the pattern.
Upon running the simulator one finds that each collision generates an ash pattern, and (as hinted again by the title), two outgoing gliders or spaceships escaping from the debris. The directions in which they escape give semaphore letters. The images at the bottom are sorted in alphabetical order.
The images in the final six-by-six grid are representations of the ashes using the cartoons we identified previously. Pairing the ashes with the corresponding cartoon images yields the following grid:
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E | W | E |
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L | I | X | I | |||
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I | L | Y | ||||
E | I | L | S | ||||
I | L | E | N | T |
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Y | S | T | S |
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Using the small images as additional clues for the words, the grid can then be filled as a symmetric word square:
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F | E | W | E | S | T |
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E | L | I | X | I | R | |
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W | I | L | I | L | Y | |
E | X | I | L | E | S | ||
S | I | L | E | N | T |
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T | R | Y | S | T | S |
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The final step is to run the grid one more step, as indicated by the only piece of unused information, the t+1 in the lower-left corner. So running the grey cells one more generation gives the following grid:
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F | E | W | E | S | T |
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E | L | I | X | I | R | |
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W | I | L | I | L | Y | |
E | X | I | L | E | S | ||
S | I | L | E | N | T |
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T | R | Y | S | T | S |
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The letters in the living cells inside the grid now spell FLYER, the final answer.