Rule definition terminology

[confocaloid]

How would you suggest that the decision should be made, about which technical definition of "transition" should be documented on the LifeWiki?

The word 'transition', as used on these forums, is local forum jargon. It's not a technical term, and doesn't have a single well-defined universal meaning. Different people mean different things in different contexts when they use the word. Therefore, there should be no such article you're suggesting.

Again, if you want to document forum jargon, then there should be a disambiguation page listing existing meanings of the word or phrase.

[dvgrn]

Applying the label "forum jargon" to an idea doesn't disqualify it from consideration. Quite a number of people have now stated that the current use of "transition" on the LifeWiki is perfectly acceptable.

No one has yet spoken up to say specifically that they want to see your proposed changes to the Hensel-notation article implemented. EDIT: fixed typo, "should be implemented" -> "implemented".

How do you propose that a decision should be made on whether to implement your proposed changes?

[confocaloid]

No matter how many times you restate your personal preferences, the most productive thing to do remains to wait until someone else, an uninvolved editor, decides to go and fix the actual problems with LifeWiki articles.

How do you propose that a decision should be made on whether to implement your proposed changes?

Crossposting, due to (unfortunate) lack of productive discussion in PM. I don't believe there's anything personal/private in the quoted parts.

No matter how many times you restate your personal preferences, the most productive thing to do remains to wait until someone else, an uninvolved editor, decides to go and fix the actual problems with LifeWiki articles.

LifeWiki is imperfect. One reason is that it is written by people who are frequently being overenthusiastic about something they have just invented themselves.

If you want to make LifeWiki more helpful, then fix the terminology so that it becomes easy to understand texts without having to shuttle back and forth between definitions.

[...]
I'd really like to be able to link to a clear definition of the single most common current usage of "transition" on the LifeWiki. I think that the seventeen uses of "transition" in the Hensel-notation article are perfectly valid -- but that the meaning is not necessarily going to be clear to newcomers without a little bit of explanation.
[...]
I'd much prefer to aim for explaining existing usage as clearly as possible on the LifeWiki -- and leave the mathematically precise restricted definitions to the writers of mathematics textbooks.

In this particular case, it's counterproductive to "aim for explaining existing usage as clearly as possible on the LifeWiki".
The word "transition" has several different common meanings. There's no "single most common current usage".

Intuitively, transitions happen when conditions are met. This is why bracketed digits are conditions and not transitions.

EDIT by dvgrn: Why did this end up in "basic questions", though? Was it meant to be in topic 6235? Report the post and I'll move it over, if so.

But yes, do definitely feel free to quote in whole or in part any past private message of mine. Especially feel free to quote "in whole", since partial quotes might leave out things that one person thinks are really important.

EDIT by confocaloid no, it was meant to be put in General discussion. Thread for basic questions seemed the most appropriate place for it.
Inner quote trimmed because the other text is not relevant to my reply. The messages are basically repetitive, and the context is not hard to guess.

[dvgrn]

...the most productive thing to do remains to wait until someone else, an uninvolved editor, decides to go and fix the actual problems with LifeWiki articles.

Um... it's true that there's no particularly huge urgency about settling this issue.

On the other hand, I've tried this "most productive" option that you're talking about for all of 2024 so far.

Nobody has stepped up to fix the obvious redlink and inconsistency in OCA:HighFlock.

That doesn't seem very productive to me. I think we can do better than that. And the idea that only an "uninvolved editor" can properly make these changes to the LifeWiki ... really still doesn't make any sense to me at all.

I have a suggested change that will get rid of the redlink and the obvious inconsistency in OCA:HighFlock. So far nobody has actually objected to my suggestion, except for you.

So I'm planning to post here in this thread my suggested text for the "transition" glossary page -- and then maybe make some changes to that text, if people have workable suggestions for improvement -- and then see if it still looks like a good idea to move that text to the LifeWiki.

[confocaloid]

Nobody has stepped up to fix the obvious redlink and inconsistency in OCA:HighFlock.

"The obvious redlink" was created by you, while participating in this very dispute, and perhaps as an intermediate step to gain upper hand in this dispute.
There were no other links to the same target at the time, and there are still no other links as of now.

The most productive thing to do would be for you to acknowledge that you're a side in this conflict, and undo your edit adding the only redlink to that target. No other changes from you are needed at this point in this debate.

So I'm planning to post here in this thread my suggested text for the "transition" glossary page -- [...]

That ignores objections that were already posted and repeated multiple times.

[dvgrn]

The most productive thing to do would be for you to acknowledge that you're a side in this conflict, and undo your edit adding the only redlink to that target. No other changes from you are needed at this point in this debate.

I certainly do acknowledge that in some sense I'm "a side in this conflict" -- that much I can do!

As far as I can tell, I'm on the same side as a large proportion of the forum, Discord, and LifeWiki communities. Of course I could be wrong about that, and if so I sincerely hope that the hypothetical silent majority will start stating their opinions, so as to set me straight.

That ignores objections that were already posted and repeated multiple times.

It does, indeed! When objections are repeated multiple times, but they don't seem to make any sense, and they aren't adjusted to account for counter-arguments ... then at some point I'm going to stop paying attention to them, and go ahead and do what I think should be done -- unless somebody else steps up and does something first, of course.

I've done my best to respect your opinions on this issue, but I honestly think that your suggested solutions will cause the exact kind of terminological confusion that you seem to be trying so desperately to avoid -- just in a slightly different but equally important place.

The plan I've outlined gives plenty of time for new objections to be registered by other community members -- not to mention that no LifeWiki change is necessarily permanent in any case.

[confocaloid]

As far as I can tell, I'm on the same side [...]

You are an active side in this entire debate. That means that you cannot yourself determine whether you're right or wrong, and cannot determine what should be done in this situation.

I suggest that you should undo your edit that added the redlink, and wait as long as needed until some other, uninvolved editor, or other uninvolved editors, will at some point in future decide to go and fix actual problems with LifeWiki.

Neither of your suggestions will fix any of the actual problems with LifeWiki.

[H. H. P. M. P. Cole]

I'm sorry to say this, but I am on confocaloid's side. I have learned much of CA terminology from them, and I feel that the terminology that they use is very intuitive once one gets the hang of it.

Unfortunately, xkcd 927 is a possible issue when creating a new 'Standard CA Terminology'. So I suggest we take a Bourbaki-style approach: a small group discusses CA terminology, and the prototype definitions are continually revised so that everyone agrees completely on the wording of each definition, such that these definitions are rigorous and maximally clear. Even though this means that not everyone in the forums will be satisfied with the definitions (and the method is very slow), it is probably the closest we can get to this goal.

Other suggestions are, of course, welcome.

[confocaloid]

Several earlier posts

I think it goes both ways. A birth transition is a cell turning on. A birth condition describes when a birth transition happens. They are paired together very tightly; every birth transition that ever happens happens because of a birth condition. Something like "B3a" is both a birth condition in the rulestring as well as a type of birth transition that happens when that birth condition is met.
EDIT: Wording

Relevant: Lifeline_Volume_5#Page_2

The passage in the LifeWiki Style Guide does in fact mean that my "descriptive, not prescriptive" statement does not apply to the LifeWiki.

Which, in turn, implies confocaloid is completely correct in arguing that LifeWiki articles should be edited for ease of understanding, even if it means replacing "transition" with "condition" wherever it would make the meaning more intuitive.

[...]
I already posted many quotes, and there are many more CA-related texts and CA-related discussions that are relevant.
viewtopic.php?p=171596#p171596
viewtopic.php?p=171671#p171671
viewtopic.php?p=172091#p172091
[...]

[dvgrn]

I'm sorry to say this, but I am on confocaloid's side.

Why sorry? People agreeing with confocaloid, especially about the proper definition of "transition", is exactly what I've been asking for. It's not quite clear to me yet if the definition of "transition" is what you're agreeing with confocaloid about, but I'm hoping you can clarify that pretty quick. Thanks for responding!

I have learned much of CA terminology from them, and I feel that the terminology that they use is very intuitive once one gets the hang of it.

Heh, yes, confocaloid is completely correct about most things -- at least 90-some percent of the time! In fact, confocaloid is almost certainly quite a bit cleverer than I am, which is one of the things that makes confocaloid such a valuable member of the community.

That's also exactly why unusual cases like this end up being so difficult and time-consuming. When confocaloid's definitions turn out to be extremely controversial, and/or are significantly out of step with the standard usage of a significant number of other community members, confocaloid sometimes seems to continue to be as just as confident as ever that their preferred changes should still be made, and that there are no other possible valid options.

This means that some of confocaloid's most vehement and confident-sounding suggestions turn out to be pretty much impossible to implement in practice, due to the large number of objections from other community members... so then we either just end up leaving issues up in the air for months without a resolution, as in this case -- or we go ahead and try something else in spite of confocaloid's objections.

I suggest that you should undo your edit that added the redlink...

This much is very easy to do -- everything on the LifeWiki is temporary, so it's easy to put it back again if the community decides it's a good idea. In the same article, I've also reverted the change from "transition" to "condition" that you made immediately after I specifically posted a moderator executive decision saying that that shouldn't be done.

The two uses of "transition" in that article are now consistent with each other, and with the seventeen uses in the Hensel-notation article, and the dozens of uses elsewhere on the LifeWiki. Tomorrow I'll post here my suggested specific wording for what a "transition" glossary page should say, and we can see what people think about that.

[confocaloid]

LifeWiki:Style guide says:

The purpose of LifeWiki is to provide encyclopedia-style content describing Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automata. All articles should be informative and targeted at the site's audience. Information that is only of interest to the writer or to other editors should not be included in articles. Articles should not assume knowledge that someone with a basic understanding of the Game of Life would not possess; relevant terminology should be explained or linked to.

LifeWiki exists to collect knowledge about Life/CA. The wiki is created with the purpose of documenting concepts and ideas. Not words and phrases.

[...] the standard usage [...]

For some unclear reason, you seem to be very confident that it always makes sense to "document existing common usage".

For some unclear reason, you seem to be very confident that it makes sense to be focused on words and phrases with many occurrences in forum search results. At the expense of actual ideas behind those words and phrases. At the expense of intuition, understanding, clarity. At the expense of the game and the hobby.

To put it bluntly, I believe that your continued obsession with "documenting common usage" [of words and phrases] prevents you from being able to understand what is an improvement and what isn't.

[...] what a "transition" glossary page should say [...]

Specifically "transition" glossary page shouldn't exist, because the word has multiple different meanings. Either there should be a disambig (listing all CA-related meanings of the word), or there should be no page at all (to avoid misleading readers).

A number of pages where the word 'transition' occurs should be rewritten, because they are written in a confusing way and do not use correct clear terminology.

[silversmith]

It seems to me that "transition" is very frequently used with the exact same meaning as the proposed use of "condition" -- so frequently, in fact, that it makes sense to keep existing uses of "transition" in that sense in LifeWiki articles. It looks to me like a lost cause to try to substitute "condition" for every use of "transition" where it could theoretically be substituted -- it just doesn't look to me like that would improve the clarity of the articles at all.
...
I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Should we leave the four uses of "transition" in the OCA:Tlife article the way they currently are, or would it be better to change them to "condition"?

I think it seems like a "lost cause" for two reasons:

• Describing B2a, S4k,... as "conditions" is unusual to those calling them "transitions", so it will sound weird in the short term no matter what.
• For this kind of change to be done without resistance, it would have to be an order of magnatude improvement over the legacy version. This is not, it's a relatively minor improvement.

Nevertheless, it makes sense to me to describe a particular configuration that determines the next state as a "condition" rather than a "transition", and so I think the minor change would be worthwhile.

No one has yet spoken up to say specifically that they want to see your proposed changes to the Hensel-notation article should be implemented.

I want to see those changes be implemented, and I would support using them in LifeWiki articles in general.

[dvgrn]

I want to see those changes be implemented, and I would support using them in LifeWiki articles in general.

Many thanks! Your response and H. H. P. M. P. Cole's are exactly the kind of feedback that I've been asking for, from people who would like to see confocaloid's suggested transition->condition substitutions happen.

Now, we've also seen specific feedback to confocaloid, saying that these recent transition->condition suggestions should not be implemented, from hotdogPi, snowman, azulavoir, Moosey, bubblegum, HerscheltheHerschel and Haycat2009, and longer explanations of why the current uses of "transition" are valid by calcyman, galoomba, and me of course. (My apologies if I've missed anyone, but this is at least a good representative sample.)

Looking at the discussion so far, I think we can all agree that there isn't a consensus yet in favor of making confocaloid's proposed substitutions.

I think we all also agree that when a LifeWiki editing topic seems to be controversial, the default thing to do is to leave existing wording as it is until a consensus appears. That's my reason for rolling back confocaloid's remaining transition->condition change in OCA:HighFlock yesterday.

So... what is the community's sense of how many additional new people would need to show up to advocate for confocaloid's changes (or how many existing commenters would need to speak up to say they've changed their minds) -- before it makes sense to say that there's a consensus in favor of making those changes?

My existing executive decision on this topic is based on the full picture of the feedback received from the community. Until that full picture changes radically, I just don't see how it's even vaguely possible to implement confocaloid's suggestions.

[confocaloid]

The community doesn't really need you "looking at the discussion so far". There is no "we". There is only your opinion (stated and restated again and again) about what is supposed to be "consensus".
You cannot provide objective summaries on this topic. You got involved in the disagreement from the start as a side with stated strong preferences.

Please stop flooding my thread with your long posts, and let people discuss the topic. This isn't the first time this happens, and this isn't the first time I'm asking you about this.

[...]
Looking at the discussion so far, I think we can all agree that [...]
[...]
My existing executive decision on this topic [...]

You are an active side in this entire debate. That means that you cannot yourself determine whether you're right or wrong, and cannot determine what should be done in this situation.

[H. H. P. M. P. Cole]

It's not quite clear to me yet if the definition of "transition" is what you're agreeing with confocaloid about, but I'm hoping you can clarify that pretty quick.

I agree with confocaloid over the definition of a condition and that of a transition. Here is part of a PM confocaloid sent me regarding conditions and transitions:

The way I see it, conditions and transitions are two completely different ideas.

A condition is a (partial or complete) specification of current states of cells in the neighbourhood. (The future state of the middle cell is left unstated.) The current state of the middle cell may or may not be specified. For example "B3", "S3" and "3" can refer to three different conditions.
"B3" says that the middle cell is currently dead and has three alive neighbours.
"S3" says that the middle cell is currently alive and has three alive neighbours.
"3" says only that the middle cell currently has three alive neighbours.

Then to define a CA rule, one just needs to say which conditions are included in the ruleset.
For example, the condition S2 is included in the ruleset B3/S23 ~~ {B3, S2, S3}.
The same condition S2 is not included in the ruleset B2/S ~~ {B2}.

Transitions can be intuitively understood as events that happen with cells. A transition can be specified by writing down an ordered pair (current cellstate, new cellstate). There are at most N^2 different transitions, where N is the number of different cellstates.

There is also a third term 'transition rule', for the combination of a condition and a transition. A transition rule prescribes what should happen to the middle cell when a certain condition is met for the neighbourhood of that cell (possibly including the cell itself).

[dvgrn]

Here's the writeup I mentioned yesterday, that could be a starting point for a LifeWiki page. Existing uses of "transition" could link to this explanation.

Now is not necessarily the right time to add a page like this to the LifeWiki -- I'm happy to continue the discussion as long as there seem to be new things to discuss.

The idea here is that, if the existing uses of "transition" are retained in the two dozen or so LifeWiki pages where they're currently found, then it seems as if any potential confused readers might benefit from having a quick obvious link on the first use of "transition" in each of those pages, to explain the intended meaning.

This is my first shot at an explanation along those lines. No doubt it could be made clearer and more succinct in all sorts of ways -- succinctness is admittedly not my strong suit. Feedback is welcome!

One idea that might be helpful is to have the name of the LifeWiki page be something like transition (CA rule), rather than just plain transition. Again, the goal is to have some easy location to link to, when the term "transition" is being used in this way.

EDITed slightly (bold red text) to address confocaloid's point about "transition rule". I think the common meaning of "transition" does indeed derive from the longer phrase "transition rule" -- it's just that it has now become rather awkward and confusing to use "transition rule", because just the one word "transition" is now the more common usage.

EDIT2: Reworded the paragraph that now says "Note that..." in red, to simplify the point about standard English vs. the technical definition.

EDIT3:: slightly simplified some wording in the example sections, e.g., removing an unnecessary "respectively".

--------------------------------------------

A '''transition''' (or sometimes '''transition rule''') is the elementary unit of a cellular-automaton [[rule]] definition.  Every non-trivial CA rule is made up of one or more transitions. Each transition is a combination of a '''condition''', plus an action that should be taken if the condition is met.<ref="post172264" />

For example, the standard [[rulestring]] for Conway's Life is "B3/S23".  This is a slightly abbreviated encoding of the three [[outer-totalistic]] transitions that make up the Life rule -- "B3" (birth when there are three neighbors), "S2" (survival when there are two neighbors), and "S3" (survival when there are three neighbors).

For the "B3" transition, the "3" specifies the three-neighbors condition, and the "B" describes the action (birth of a new ON cell, or equivalently the change of a cell state from 0 to 1) that will happen when that condition is met.

Note that the action is not always a "transition" in the standard English-language definition of the word.  For example, births involve cells that actually change from state 0 to state 1, but surviving cells simply remain unchanged in state 1.

A rule such as "B3/S23" is assumed to provide instructions for all possible situations that can arise -- including all transitions complementary to the stated transitions:

* if there's no matching condition that says a cell will be born, the cell will not be born:  it will start in state 0 and end in state 0, a transition sometimes known as "stagnation" or "abstain" (abbreviation 'A').
* If there's no matching condition that says a cell will survive, the cell will die (abbreviation "D".)

Thus Conway's Life rules could theoretically be written as "A01245678/D0145678", but not surprisingly the simpler "B3/S23" is almost universally used instead.

==Example for isotropic rules==
Rulespaces other than outer-totalistic "Life-like" rules have different sets of elementary transitions.  For [[isotropic]] rules, for example, there are 102 elementary transitions that subdivide the 18 outer-totalistic ones.  The size of a CA rulespace depends on the number of elementary transitions making up that rulespace; thus there are 2¹⁸ outer-totalistic Life-like rules, but 2¹⁰² possible isotropic rules.

* "S2" can be subdivided into S2c, S2e, S2k, S2a, S2i, and S2n [[Hensel notation|isotropic transitions]]
* "B3" can be subdivided into B3c, B3e, B3k, B3a, B3i, B3n, B3y, B3q, B3j, and B3r
* "S3" can be subdivided into S3c, S3e, S3k, S3a, S3i, S3n, S3y, S3q, S3j, and S3r

So the standard Conway's Life rule could non-canonically be written as "B3cekainyqj/S2cekain3cekainyqj", explicitly listing all of the isotropic transitions that make up the rule.

== Similar terms==
In common usage, a reference to an isotropic transition such as "B3j" may equally well use the word "condition" instead, often with a modifier -- "birth condition" or "survival condition". It's correct to use either 'condition' or 'transition' to refer to the elementary units of a rulestring.<ref="post172264" />

==Other common meanings of 'transition'==
[not sure what might be wanted here, but if there are other common meanings then this seems like a workable place for them]

<references>
<ref name="post72264">{{LinkForumThread
|format = ref
|title  = Re: Next steps on getting back to normal editing for OCA:tlife
|p      = 72264
|author = Adam P. Goucher
|date   = November 30, 2023
}}</ref>
</references>

[confocaloid]

I acknowledge that I've received that feedback from you -- and I don't think that it's appropriate for you to keep repeating it.

I don't think it is appropriate for you to keep flooding terminology discussion threads with your long posts that are trying to "oversee" the discussion without actually contributing anything new or productive. Again, please do not flood the discussion places, and let other people discuss the matter. Your posts are offtopic.

Here's the writeup I mentioned yesterday [...]

Keep the formatting in your posts simple. The use of bold/italics/underline/font color/font size is not necessary in most cases.

[confocaloid]

Here's the writeup I mentioned yesterday, that could be a starting point for a LifeWiki page. [...] Feedback is welcome! [...]

Feedback (regarding your idea to make a page for the word) was already provided in previous discussion. You ignored that feedback.
I see no reason to expect that you won't ignore any further feedback (regardless of the source).

Repeating myself, because you are repeating yourself again and again

So: what should the "transition" glossary article say?

It cannot be an article about a single well-defined concept, because it's basically forum jargon, rather than a single well-defined universally-understood term.
Different people use the word with different meanings.

Sometimes the intended meaning is "a state-to-state transition" (birth, death, survival, stagnation).
Other times, the intended meaning is "the act of going from one rulestring to another rulestring while rulegolfing".
Other times, the intended meaning is "a shorthand for the term 'transition rule'".

By itself the word 'transition' is too ambiguous to be useful on LifeWiki, unless context makes it totally clear what is the exact intended meaning.

A consequence is that if you want to make a wiki page for this word, then it should be a disambiguation page, not an article.
Another consequence is that actual articles discussing other topics should avoid this word, unless it is necessary; it is too ambiguous to be helpful when explaining things to readers.

[silversmith]

Looking at the discussion so far, I think we can all agree that there isn't a consensus yet in favor of making confocaloid's proposed substitutions.

Now is not necessarily the right time to add a page like this to the LifeWiki -- I'm happy to continue the discussion as long as there seem to be new things to discuss.

I agree, unless the substitutions receive more than the current three or so individuals worth of support, it would be best to put on hold any changes to existing uses of "transition".

https://kyleshevlin.com/conways-game-of-life

Each cell can be in one of two states: alive or dead. Cells die or reanimate based on a set of conditions. Those are:
An alive cell with fewer than 2 neighbors dies
An alive cell with 2 or 3 neighbors lives
An alive cell with 4 or more neighbors dies
A dead cell with exactly 3 neighbors reanimates

This quote uses "condition" in its common English meaning, rather than as a technical term. "Conditions" here could be replaced by "rules" for example, but "rule" definitely can't be used for things like B6.

Funnily enough, it seems to match both the English meaning and confocaloid's, which in this context are functionally equivalent in referring to "the thing which determines the next state".

[confocaloid]

The "green writeup" is misleading in several ways, beginning from the first sentence.

(1) The word 'transition' is not a single well-defined useful term. It is a jargon word, used here on these forums, with several different meanings in different contexts. I already listed some of the existing meanings.

It is misleading to pick one meaning, aggressively advertise it as if it was a "term" and not a jargon word, and "accidentally forget" about all other meanings.

(2) What the "writeup" apparently attempts to describe, is traditionally called a transition rule.

Cellular automata use rulesets that consist of transition rules.
Transition rules can be viewed as ordered pairs (condition; transition). If the condition is met, then the transition happens.
In a 2-state Moore-neighborhood CA, there are just four possible transitions: 0 -> 0, 0 -> 1, 1 -> 0, 1 -> 1.

(3) edit: no longer directly applicable since the "green writeup" was edited.
Transitions do not require change in a cell state between generations.
"An alive cell remaining alive in the next generation" is a transition (survival).
"A dead cell remaining dead in the next generation" is also a transition.

(4) All Life-like cellular automata are outer-totalistic. There's no need to specify "outer-totalistic" explicitly.

(5) "may equally well" is false. Conditions and transition rules are two different concepts.
A condition says something about the current states of cells in a neighbourhood, but doesn't say anything about future states of cells.
In contrast, a transition rule must tell the future state of at least one cell. (Usually that's the middle cell of a neighbourhood. There are exceptions, like asymmetric neighbourhoods or block cellular automata.)

added later

https://kyleshevlin.com/conways-game-of-life

This quote uses "condition" in its common English meaning, rather than as a technical term. "Conditions" here could be replaced by "rules" for example, but "rule" definitely can't be used for things like B6.

Funnily enough, it seems to match both the English meaning and confocaloid's, which in this context are functionally equivalent in referring to "the thing which determines the next state".

"B6" can be used as a shorthand for the condition "a cell is currently dead and has exactly 6 alive neighbours".

Alternatively (differently), "B6" can be used as a shorthand for the rule "a dead cell with exactly 6 alive neighbours becomes alive in the next generation".

[unname4798]

(4) All Life-like cellular automata are outer-totalistic. There's no need to specify "outer-totalistic" explicitly.

4. Life-like can refer to a set of rules by a behaviour or 2-state OT Moore rules.

B/S is Life-like in a sense, while not in another sense.

tlife is the opposite.

[confocaloid]

[...] B/S is Life-like in a sense, while not in another sense. [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-like ... _automaton

If you read through various forum posts and chats, then different people use the same words and phrases with different meanings in different discussions.

However, LifeWiki aims to provide encyclopedia-style content describing Life and other cellular automata.
Forum posts are written by enthusiasts and for other enthusiasts.
In contrast, wiki articles are written for readers from the wider Life/CA community. Those readers will find it very hard to understand and remember every single piece of local jargon, especially when local jargon conflicts with intuitive understanding of the words and phrases.

That is why one should not simply blindly copy wording from the forums to the wiki. There are different requirements and there are style guidelines, to make sure that LifeWiki remains helpful for actual readers from the site's audience. LifeWiki:Style guide

If there is a CA-related meaning that agrees with intuitive understanding, then do not contradict the intuition.
If there is a CA-related meaning that is already defined and widely used in the wider Life/CA community, then do not contradict that definition.

[confocaloid]

This 2D chaotic replicator:

Code: Select all

x = 2, y = 4, rule = B3-y4ek5y/S2-i34t6c
o$o$2o!

...is only 2 transitions away from this 1D clean replicator:

Code: Select all

x = 2, y = 4, rule = B3-y4e5y6i/S2-i34t6c
o$2o$o!

Can you please define and expain what you mean by that, exactly? What would you write if you wanted to explain the same thing to a LifeWiki reader, instead of posting it on the forums?

The above quoted post doesn't agree with intuition. A "transition" is supposed to be an event. A "replicator" is supposed to be an object. It is unclear how one object can be "N events away from" another object, unless one of two objects evolves into the other object after N ticks.

That also doesn't agree with any of proposed definitions so far. All definitions so far discuss CA rulesets and single cells (albeit using different wording).

[...]
If you read through various forum posts and chats, then different people use the same words and phrases with different meanings in different discussions.

However, LifeWiki aims to provide encyclopedia-style content describing Life and other cellular automata.
Forum posts are written by enthusiasts and for other enthusiasts.
In contrast, wiki articles are written for readers from the wider Life/CA community. Those readers will find it very hard to understand and remember every single piece of local jargon, especially when local jargon conflicts with intuitive understanding of the words and phrases.

That is why one should not simply blindly copy wording from the forums to the wiki. There are different requirements and there are style guidelines, to make sure that LifeWiki remains helpful for actual readers from the site's audience. LifeWiki:Style guide

If there is a CA-related meaning that agrees with intuitive understanding, then do not contradict the intuition.
If there is a CA-related meaning that is already defined and widely used in the wider Life/CA community, then do not contradict that definition.

[iddi01]

Can you please define and expain what you mean by that, exactly? What would you write if you wanted to explain the same thing to a LifeWiki reader, instead of posting it on the forums?

The above quoted post doesn't agree with intuition. A "transition" is supposed to be an event. A "replicator" is supposed to be an object. It is unclear how one object can be "N events away from" another object, unless one of two objects evolves into the other object after N ticks.

That also doesn't agree with any of proposed definitions so far. All definitions so far discuss CA rulesets (albeit using different wording).

I wrote that post in a way that most other forum users write stuff (and that means they will understand it). I never thought about anything related to this unexpected and confusing speech of yours.

You have to understand that the forums is not LifeWiki, and that forums posts are not supposed to be read by everyone.

In forum posts, "transition" means things like b2a, b3i, etc. You surely knew that, so why ask that question?

[confocaloid]

You have to understand that the forums is not LifeWiki, and that forums posts are not supposed to be read by everyone. [...]

You did not answer my question. How would you explain the same ideas to a LifeWiki reader?

I knew that the forums are not LifeWiki. I said that myself several times. viewtopic.php?p=183634#p183634