Such puffers are typically produced by artificial means[clarification needed].
A clean puffer, conversely, has a small amount of debris that appears much more organized.
[2] Puffers are significant for Life and related rules for three reasons: First, if they can be stabilized in such a way that they produce only gliders (that is, turned into rakes) they can be used as part of many more complex patterns such as breeders.
Second, stabilizations of puffers that eliminate all of their output debris can be used to produce spaceships with arbitrarily large periods.
And third, puffers can sometimes be tamed or combined to form spaceships with speeds that do not seem to be achievable in other ways; for instance, in Life, the switch engine is a puffer train discovered by Charles Corderman that moves diagonally at speed c/12 (one cell every 12 generations on average), and in 1991 Dean Hickerson showed how to combine several switch engines to form a c/12 spaceship that he called the Cordership.