Some wiki things

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gmc_nxtman
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Some wiki things

Post by gmc_nxtman » October 15th, 2015, 12:04 am

1. The "general disclaimer" page on LifeWiki is missing.

2. I suggest that similar to the "glider synthesis" link under the pattern box, there should be a "slow salvo construction" box with the minimum known number of SL for a seed and the minimum known glider cost from a block, also the period of the salvo.

3. In addition, I suggest that there should also be, for every oscillator in the "common oscillators" list (which may be obsolete and need updating, by the way) there should be a link to its page in catagolue. (Similar to the links to Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of Life and the Life Lexicon, e.g. "Phoenix at Catagolue")

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dvgrn
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Re: Some wiki things

Post by dvgrn » October 15th, 2015, 4:13 pm

gmc_nxtman wrote:2. I suggest that similar to the "glider synthesis" link under the pattern box, there should be a "slow salvo construction" box with the minimum known number of SL for a seed and the minimum known glider cost from a block, also the period of the salvo.
This is a good idea, which has definitely come up before. My answer from that thread is quoted below.

It occurs to me that things are even more complicated than I said they were, though:

1) the glider-construction data in the infobox was originally mostly imported straight out of Mark Niemiec's very well-organized database of glider syntheses. There isn't really a similarly well-organized database for slow-salvo syntheses.

2) There are actually a lot of different kinds of slow salvos. In rough increasing order of efficiency, there's P1-monochromatic-slow, P1-polychromatic-slow, P2-monochromatic-slow, and P2-polychromatic-slow -- not to mention exotic things like constructions with slow LWSSes, which have similar variants.

These types of slow salvos are all universal, and most of them have been used in actual pattern-building. But four separate slots for slow-salvo records and recipes seems like a lot.

3) Slow recipes for most objects will remain unknown for the foreseeable future, unless someone writes a compiler that can construct a seed for an arbitrary synchronized glider recipe, and another compiler to find an efficient slow-salvo recipe for an arbitrary constellation.

It will take a lot of work yet to just build a good slow-salvo construction database. never mind actually copying all that data into the LifeWiki (once it exists).
dvgrn wrote:EDIT:
codeholic wrote:I think, time has come to have slow salvo construction section in the infobox on LifeWiki, analogous to the glider synthesis section.
The only tricky part about listing slow-salvo construction on the LifeWiki is that the slow salvo with the smallest number of gliders probably won't be anywhere near the most useful slow salvo for a given object. Really we want to collect, usually, two or four completely different slow-salvo constructions -- one that can put each orientation of the object at the very back edge of its construction envelope.

It can also be worth collecting recipes that can drop the object at (or near) a lateral edge of the construction envelope -- for non-symmetric objects, it will probably be a different recipe at each edge again. Even that might not always be enough: there might be a really useful recipe where Object X shows up nowhere near the NW or NE edges of the construction envelope, but it's right on the N boundary. In general the metric for usefulness seems to be the number of cells from Object X to the nearest boundary of untouched space.

This all seems like a painful amount of detail to try to fit into a LifeWiki info box.

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