danny wrote:Wait I'm confused. How does this turn into synthesize a pulsar? Wouldn't there be a heckton of ash at the end? I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding the thread's contents or anything, I just have lots of questions...
Not to worry -- it's not just you, it really is getting painfully confusing! Now is probably a good time for a fresh summary of how to get to a pulsar (or any other constructible object) with these 35 ultra-clever gliders.
I'm hoping I can get close, but someone may need to supply a few corrections. First, a few bullet points to keep in mind:
- Below is just the outline for constructing something simple, like a pulsar.
- If you want something more complicated, like a million Geminis going in all different directions, then you have to design a 1-glider seed constellation that will build the million Geminis, and trigger it at the last minute -- an additional glider along with the meteor showers in Step 9 below.
- If you want a quadratic-growth replicator, or even a record-breaking low-population knightship or SMOS, then you have to add a lot more stuff: some kind of circuitry capable of storing bits coming in from the Sakapuffer, and then using them later after the cleanup. Let's not go there for this summary.
------------------------------------------
Okay, we're building a pulsar. We have an empty quadrant off to the east that we can put it in, where it won't get in the way of anything, so we'll build it first.
Step 1: Bits start coming in from the Sakapuffer, hitting the BLSE, and doing the clever 9fd/19fd crystal dance that calcyman and chris_c have cooked up.
Step 2: This 9/19 dance eventually produces monochromatic P1 slow gliders heading NE, which first build a target T at the NW end of the BLSE ash track (and a little north of it).
Step 3: Later NE-traveling monochromatic gliders gradually build one-time turner constellations NE of the BLSE ash track.
Step 4: When triggered, these OTTs produce polychromatic p2 slow gliders traveling NW, parallel to the BLSE ash track, aimed at target T.
Step 5: Target T should be a secondary slow elbow, plus a hand target some safe distance off to the NE. The polychromatic gliders eventually turn T into the desired pattern P, at a safe offset in the empty East Quadrant.
Interesting But Not Really Critically Important Factoid: Previous designs required pulling elbow blocks from farther and farther away down the BLSE ash track, resulting in a horrible quadratic slowdown in construction that kindasorta balances out the quadratic speedup in the bits coming in from the Sakapuffer. With this design, whenever the source of elbows gets too far away down the BLSE ash track, it's possible to do a reset, and start building the next OTT starting right near where the elbows are.
The gliders turned by the one-time turners will have progressively farther to travel northwest to hit target T, but that ultimately doesn't slow anything down. This means that there's a fixed maximum cost in bits-from-the-Sakapuffer, for each new glider in the recipe that builds pattern P -- instead of a quadratically increasing cost.
That's a nice feature... except that the 9/19 crystal dance is inefficient enough that, as chris_c says, it will take a fairly large initial pattern just to get the Sakapuffer far enough away to produce enough bits to create the first NE glider, let alone the initial target T or the first OTT aimed at it.
Step 6: Now we have our Pattern P -- a pulsar or whatever it is. We also have the metric heckton of ash that danny mentioned. There's lots more work to be done to get rid of all that ash. Luckily we still have our Target T elbow, and can throw more gliders at it. So we'll use it to build blocks or other still lifes that can catch the incoming GPSEs at the right times, without releasing any additional gliders.
Step 7: We'll also build a Relatively Simple Seed Constellation, and trigger it. The purpose of this is to synchronize a couple of gliders that head SE and stop the BLSE without releasing any additional gliders. We know that just takes a couple of gliders.
Unnecessary Side Note: I think, because of the quadratic speedup in the bits coming in, these two gliders could really be produced right away, before Pattern P is constructed. Doesn't seem to matter, though.
Step 8: Now it's time to build Painfully Complicated Seed Constellations #1 and #2. When PCSC#1 is triggered, it will produce several Corderships traveling along the various ash tracks in various directions, cleaning up some part of them, or let's just say all of them (I think that will be doable now)... and then crashing into the messy junk at the various GPSE and Sakapuffer construction locations without releasing any additional gliders -- except for one or two heading back toward PCSC#2.
EDIT: Per chris_c's note below, the trigger glider for PCSC#1 will probably come from the Sakapuffer crashing into a custom one-time turner built for the purpose of producing the PCSC #1 trigger glider.
Step 9: After a truly ridiculously long time, the returning glider(s) trigger PCSC#2, which produces three meteor showers of gliders.
Step 10: After another truly ridiculously long time of equal length, these meteor-shower gliders clean up all the rest of the faraway junk at the GPSE and Sakapuffer construction locations... without releasing any additional gliders, of course.
And now all that's left is the pulsar! In only ten steps, too... This all seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to build a pulsar with 35 gliders, but theoretically the same setup (plus one more glider in Step 9) can build a million Geminis.
-- Okay, what did I leave out?