How to do glider synthesis, anyone?
How to do glider synthesis, anyone?
Does anybody here know how to engineer glider syntheses, please?
Re: How to do glider synthesis, anyone?
I've found a few. The how varies.
Some of them came about when I noticed a reaction in a random soup and then isolated it into known constructible parts. The three glider synthesis of a Pentadecathlon was one such case, where I noticed that the predecessor was simply a pre-Traffic Light perterbed by a passing Glider. The discovery of the conversion of the Ship to a Bi-pole was again a case of looking at how the unusual object came about.
I've also been doing an enumeration of single Glider collisions with stable objects (about mid-way through the 17-bit stable ones). Most of the reactions consist of reducing the size of an object, but occasionally something interesting pops up (like that one that adds a Beehive to an object Dave Greene mentioned in another thread recently.) There are also the occasional "out-of-the-blue" cases where the target disappears and a new, rare object appears a few generations later.
You also need to build up a "toolkit" of reactions that add bits and pieces, and to learn how to predict what the effect of various sparks might be, and how to get those sparks in just the right place at the right time. Also knowing how to recognize which intermediate steps will produce the desired result when there's just no way to get directly to what you want. (There's all sorts of ways of moving and mutating inductors, for example.)
Some of them came about when I noticed a reaction in a random soup and then isolated it into known constructible parts. The three glider synthesis of a Pentadecathlon was one such case, where I noticed that the predecessor was simply a pre-Traffic Light perterbed by a passing Glider. The discovery of the conversion of the Ship to a Bi-pole was again a case of looking at how the unusual object came about.
I've also been doing an enumeration of single Glider collisions with stable objects (about mid-way through the 17-bit stable ones). Most of the reactions consist of reducing the size of an object, but occasionally something interesting pops up (like that one that adds a Beehive to an object Dave Greene mentioned in another thread recently.) There are also the occasional "out-of-the-blue" cases where the target disappears and a new, rare object appears a few generations later.
You also need to build up a "toolkit" of reactions that add bits and pieces, and to learn how to predict what the effect of various sparks might be, and how to get those sparks in just the right place at the right time. Also knowing how to recognize which intermediate steps will produce the desired result when there's just no way to get directly to what you want. (There's all sorts of ways of moving and mutating inductors, for example.)
Re: How to do glider synthesis, anyone?
Maybe you can help me figure out what this and that do.
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H. V. McIntosh
- Posts: 49
- Joined: June 20th, 2009, 5:26 pm
- Location: Mexico
Re: How to do glider synthesis, anyone?
A strategy which has not been mentioned is just to watch some of the brute force simulations, in which all the initial patterns in some rectangle or toroid are generated and watched for interesting results. Evidently this is time and attention consuming and so is not much used. It is related to the soup-watching above mentioned - random fields can cover greater areas.Alegend wrote:Does anybody here know how to engineer glider syntheses, please?
A much more systematic approach is to deliberately place gliders rather than arbitrary fields, since the presence of a glider is then a given. Surely this has been the way a great number, if not the majority, of syntheses has been discovered. And, of course, perturbations to known constructions are easier to examine than arbitrary evolutions.
Although there is a great abundance of syntheses available through the internet, there seems to be a lack of detailed explanations, concretely in the new LifeWiki. It is a standard feature of items in the pattern list to state how many gliders are needed to create them, and even some references to the RLE code. It is one thing to have ''a'' synthesis, and another to mention how many (not counting similar patterns due simply to approaching gliders), Adding this information could be useful, as well as giving some explicit image sequences. True, there are many animated patterns and Java scripts, but it is not so easy to capture individual frames and print them out for further study. Possible, with dexterity and patience, but tedious. Or just look for the information somewhere else.
Aside from these remarks, the motivation for this present query is the contents of the Talk page on the LifeWike concerning the color of gliders. The "color" or otherwise parity of a glider or glider stream is an invariant of the symmetry group, especially the existence or nonexistence of a reflection accompanying a shift. In turn this reminds me of a result in Wolfram's Rule 110 derived from the periodicity of the ether, which by itself has a shift 14 symmetry. If glider collisions are otherwise completely surrounded by ether, the disruption of the ether phase is the same before and after the collision, and so is an invariant. As such, it can be used to rule out many collisions and predict which ones will occur. In practice, 2 being a factor of 14, it is the parity of the collision which is used.
My question is, do gliders and space ships have similar invariants? If so, they could be used to foresee glider reflections, rotations by 90 degrees, duplication, transmutation and such like.
-hvm