Unofficial symmetries

[XnossisX]

I have been trying to figure out how to use unofficial symmetries in apgsearch. Recently, catagolue has started listing the soups for every symmetry in the rule that has found it, and I don't have a clue for what the inflated, unofficial, and troll symmetries are. Besides, I'm not even sure what some actually do.

[Apple Bottom]

I have been trying to figure out how to use unofficial symmetries in apgsearch. Recently, catagolue has started listing the soups for every symmetry in the rule that has found it, and I don't have a clue for what the inflated, unofficial, and troll symmetries are. Besides, I'm not even sure what some actually do.

Official symmetries are the (uninflated) symmetries that apgluxe 4.x supports out of the box, to wit:

For square grids:

• * asymmetric: 1x256, 2x128, 4x64, 8x32, C1;
  * cyclic: C2_1, C2_2, C2_4, C4_1, C4_4;
  * dihedral: D2_+1, D2_+2, D2_x, D4_+1, D4_+2, D4_+4, D4_x1, D4_x4, D8_1, D8_4

For hexagonal grids:

• * asymmetric: 1x256, 2x128, 4x64, 8x32, C1;
  * cyclic: C2_1, C2_4, C3_1, C3_3, C6;
  * dihedral: D2_x, D2_xo, D4_x1, D4_x4, D6_1, D6_1o, D6_3, D12

(C3_3 and D6_3 are not yet implemented client-side.)

Inflated symmetries are variants of the official symmetries where each soup is inflated prior to evolution. At each inflation step, a cell in the soup is replaced with a 2x2 square of cells in the same state; the number of i's indicates the number of inflation steps. (So iC1 soups are 32x32, iiC1 soups are 64x64, iiiC1 soups are 128x128, etc.)

Troll symmetries are those used to troll Catagolue.

Unofficial symmetries are all symmetries not covered by the above.

[dani]

oh, so THATS what C and D stand for. I was wondering what happened to A and B

It should be noted that troll symmetries are greatly discouraged and non standardized. It is wise to post the source code on ConwayLife along with an additional symmetry.

[Apple Bottom]

It is wise to post the source code on ConwayLife along with an additional symmetry.

Indeed, this is true.

I think it's also worth pointing out again that while Catagolue is primarily being used for soup-searching, it doesn't have to be. Quoting Calcyman:

[Catagolue] basically accepts anything that you choose to pass off as a rule name, symmetry type, and apgcode. If you make a search program which produces haul files for your favourite CA, then Catagolue will happily build a distributed census [...]

The search program needn't even be a soup search: if you have a depth-first search program such as gfind or zfind, and you have a correspondence between positions in the search tree and alphanumeric strings (where prefixes correspond to ancestors), then you can conduct a distributed search for (say) width-20 c/6 spaceships using the existing Catagolue framework. If you incorporate all of zfind's command-line hyperparameters (period, offset, memory size, etc.) into the beginning of this string, then you can simply have a 'symmetry' called zfind whose tabulations will include things such as xq7, xq10, xq19 (potentially!), etc. And this will work without changing Catagolue in any way.

[Senso]

So Catagolue could keep data for non-GoL CAs, like custom rulesets made by people in this forum. That's an interesting possibility.