A for awesome wrote:The "E" comes from
here.
I suppose it might be a right turn, but I was taking the standard orientation as the one where it matches the Herschel standard orientation most closely... Also, it does start moving east in that orientation; it only goes south after the LOM disappears.
Yeah, I saw that, but it's a fairly short-lived spark. Would probably need a transparent catalyst to pull the reaction in that direction, as you say. A CatForce search would definitely be a good idea here.
Meanwhile, the other converter inputs and outputs tend to have a fairly clear direction -- either the direction the reaction is usually traveling away from (to reach an output location) or the direction the object is about to travel toward (starting from an input). Objects that just wobble around more or less in one place are much harder to get hold of with a series of catalysts, even if they explode over time.
That makes the E-heptomino potentially pretty interesting, because it
does travel quite well. Not very cleanly, but R's and pi's are about equally messy, and the tub-with-tail is a good cleanup. You've shown that the E can be produced "naturally" from a catalyzed reaction, so it's just a question of whether it appears near the edge of a reaction envelope, in a workable orientation, often enough to be useful.
-- I wonder, how long does it take before one of these shows up in a frame-by-frame analysis of large random soups, at T>=100 let's say? I'm wondering if the frequency of natural E objects might be comparable to QBs at least.
Actually I'm surprised that E-heptominos haven't been mentioned before (that I can remember, anyway). They're not in
simsim314's list of potential input/output objects, for example... and yet I suspect they would start showing up all over the place if people started looking for them. There's a really long low-population bottleneck before the E shows up -- population counts
10, 8, 10, 12, 12, 11, 12, 10, 10, 8,10, 7, 7, 9, 10 ...
with the second "7" being the E. Any time an active population drops below a dozen cells or so, the resulting pattern acts as an attractor of sorts: populations fluctuate up and down, and in the "up" direction there are untold billions of possibilities... but when the population drops into single digits, there are relatively very few arrangements, so the odds are much improved that the reaction will drop into a known "channel" and produce a clean pi or B or E.
[For similar reasons, a much higher percentage of small-pop-count active objects are symmetrical, which accounts for some of the prevalence of honeyfarms and traffic lights and pi-heptominos and so on. Unfortunately the E-heptomino won't get a boost from that effect.]
It occurs to me that it's vaguely possible that a known conduit
already includes an E stage, most likely 42 ticks before some B output or 62 ticks before an H output -- unrecognized just because nobody knew to look for it. If something like that can be found, that could give new working input and output options.