Talk:Gliderless gun
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Where is the glider-shaped polyplet at T=0?? And if it is the $2bo$2bo$2o$b3o!, it also evolves into a Pi, not a glider! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)
- Please keep trying to remember to sign your comments. Four tildes at the end. It isn't that hard. Except that I've also been known to forget, fairly regularly.
- -- Yes, the polyplet in question is either the bo$o$3o! or the 2bo$2o$b2o! subset of your 2bo$2bo$2o$b3o! cluster. This gliderless gun never contains a glider as a cluster, but there are quite a few phases where a a region appears that can be cropped to get a glider shape.
- Now, it's absolutely true that the LifeWiki definitions of "polyplet" and "cluster" don't make this distinction really clear. You could argue that "cluster" and "polyplet" both equally allow additional ON cells to exist around their edges. Possibly the definition of "cluster" should be made a little stricter, to better match current common usage.
- Your edits seemed problematic to me because you were effectively interpreting "polyplet" to mean "group of kingwise-connected ON cells surrounded by a ring of OFF cells"... but that's exactly what "cluster" means already. With either of your changes, the last two items in the list suddenly meant exactly the same thing. In which case, if the final "duplicate" line remains on the list, you're seriously increasing the potential confusion.
- But please don't just go ahead and delete the last line without thinking hard about it. When Tropylium created the list of "increasingly strict" conditions, the intention was clearly to have the last two lines not mean the same thing. So... if the last line didn't mean "glider-shaped cluster" (kingwise-connected ON cell group surrounded by a loop of orthogonally adjacent OFF cells), it must have meant "glider-shaped polpylet" (kingwise-connected ON cell group without the condition that it's surrounded by OFF cells). That's a much harder criterion, and this gun doesn't fulfill it (but some future discovery might).
- Anyway, the distinction between "cluster" and "polyplet" is pretty clear to me from the context... but it was obviously confusing to you, and therefore maybe to other people. So there might be a better way to restate Tropylium's strictest condition. How about "the absence of any rectangular bounding box containing a glider-shaped polyplet, at any point in the operation of the gun"? Dvgrn (talk) 19:37, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
According to Cluster, a cluster is actually a section that does not pass through 2 OFF cells! THen what is the definition of "polyplet"? 03:57, 15 January 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)
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- A polyplet is a kingwise-connected group of ON cells, with no mention of the part about not passing through two OFF cells. So by implication, and in common usage, a cluster is a pattern on the Life grid that you could move a chess rook around the perimeter of, one cell at a time, without stepping on any ON cells. The definition of "polyplet" doesn't mention that criterion at all. So for example you could find two different glider-shaped polyplets in a cap, but you couldn't find even one glider-shaped cluster in a cap.
- That's my understanding of the intended distinction between the last two lines of that "increasingly strict" list, anyway. Dvgrn (talk) 23:51, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
- You made another change to the article, but it seemed to make things more confusing. If the suggestion in your first parenthetical phrase is followed, the last two lines in the list end up meaning the same thing again.
- I've changed the last line in the list as suggested above, so now with any luck there will be no further need to insert confusing extra clauses into the middles of perfectly good sentences. If you really want this gun to fit all of the list's criteria, you'd have to simply remove the last item on the list, instead of trying again and again to change what that list item is clearly supposed to mean.