Not a Life replicator, but still interesting

As I said in my post on Golly and Life, I completely missed the fuss that happened last spring about Andrew Wade's Gemini pattern, first revealed to the world in a forum discussion. It got written up in a typically breathless New Scientist article, then got picked up by BoingBoing and Slashdot in the usual way of such things. Most of the articles seemed unclear on what was actually interesting about the pattern; often it was identified as "first mathematical artificial life" or something along those lines. Then there ensued controversy over whether it really counted as a replicator. (Andrew Wade never claimed to have achieved the holy grail of a true Life replicator; he called it a "universal-constructor-based spaceship". In cellular-automaton jargon, a spaceship is any pattern that moves itself around intact.)

Having watched it run through a few full lifecycles in Golly, I say it's not a replicator in the sense that a living cell is one, but it's still pretty cool; it makes use of universal-construction principles in an unusually simple way for a Life pattern. I get the impression that Life tinkerers have been busy playing with the new set of toys that it implies.
( A long essay WITH AWESOME DIAGRAM about replicators, cellular automata, and Gemini )

(Update, March 2025: Fixed the Life Wiki links.)