Why is this important?
1) When searching for new oscillators with high volatility, it would help to predict what heat is the most probable one from some of the phases of the oscillator by estimating its period. Search scripts could potentially use an optimised version of a formula to do so and increase the efficiency.
2) Potentially, the concept itself could be extended to spaceships and it could help to understand things like the almost-knightship, copperhead, etc. and aid in finding the rest of the small-ish elemental spaceships.
After messing around for a while with SPSS, I devised a formula that gives a very good approximation for the heat of an oscillator based on the maximum population (Pmax), minimum population (Pmin) and period (T) in a way that...
Heat = 0.2048*(Pmax*sqrt(Pmax+Pmin)/(Pmin*sqrt(T)) + 1.1338
No coefficients have been adjusted for the expression itself, which for now I'll call K.
The following list of oscillators fit quite nicely with the expression:
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Blinker
Toad
Pulsar
Mazing
Octagon II
Pentadecathlon
Fumarole
Figure 8
Achim 8
Blocker
Unix
Caterer
Bent keys
Odd keys
Short keys
However, as you might already be thinking, there are immediately some problems with this.
The first one is that many oscillators don't fit (like mold, jam, smiley or even beacon).
The second one is that it does not account for a possible non-standard dimension of the stator (mold on cap on cap on cap on cap on cap on cap on table, etc. would fit extremely poorly).
Hence, while the model is a nice first step, I think that there are a few things that have to be addressed to make it useful:
- I'm sure that the reason why it predicts nicely the heat of the oscillators I listed is due to the size of the rotor having a correlation to the populations
- Therefore, if that is true, it would be appropriate to redefine the equation to take into account ONLY the minimum and maximum populations of the ROTOR (or predicted rotor)
- If that is the case, the anomalies for smiley, monogram and queen bee shuttles would be easy to explain, they just seemed "highly unlikely" -- however, it won't explain the case of mold or jam, that's probably down to something else