Talk:Heisenburp

Copyediting the Examples section?

The Examples section was added by EV in 2018. Today I noticed several problems with these demonstrations, and it seems to be in need of in-depth copyediting. Here are some questions:

About the images - Do we need these two blurred images with aged (they remind me of Lifeline diagrams), custom (and thus inofficial) style? Isn't the LifeViewer display with commands enough?
About the examples - Where are they first discovered? Where are they used in practice? Since there are actually two Heisenburp reactions, is it better to separate them? Or am I missing any actual application of the tandem reaction? What are the other spaceships not involved in the Heisenburp doing?

They are there to describe the clearance. See heisenburp.py. Ultimium (talk) 01:52, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

The pattern in heisenburp.py is a pseudo-Heisenburp, which starts with a highway robber and ends with a glider inserter. Clearance consideration is, as far as I see, only for these two stages. For the true Heisenburp demonstrations in the article, it is clear that clearance is not as relevant. GUYTU6J (talk) 03:53, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

EDIT: Recently dvgrn has left a note in User talk:Entity Valkyrie 2#Sudden burst of main-namespace editing in the last week, opposing the use of extra gliders. Thus the additional spaceships here should be deleted for consistency. GUYTU6J (talk) 12:41, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

About the text - Is it necessary to describe the mechanism by generations in such a detailed way? Isn't the information about when and where a ship eats half of a traffic light and how fast it recovers irrelevant?

Don't be rude, please. These informations are actually what we'd *like* to see - a detailed explaination is always better than no explaination at all, and how they recovered are actually closely related to the topic. There are already several consensuses on this wiki, like the methuselah stable pattern thing, even if it's "irrelevant" to list all those ash patterns most of the time.Ultimium (talk) 01:59, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Do I show rudeness? Or is it just that the questions are a bit sharp? I became aware of irrelevancy after reading User_talk:Entity_Valkyrie_1. Back to topic, there are still many details that I think is redundant. Say, for example, these sentences:

Top left -- Generation 0: The purple HWSS ... of the spaceship cluster will be used. The HWSS will convert the green Herschel to a pi-heptomino...
Left -- Generation 21: The purple HWSS gives out its spark, changing the evolution of the Herschel. ...
Bottom left -- Generation 108: The HWSS cluster glides off to the north undamaged; the purple HWSS was not even temporarily affected. ...

They are all saying one thing: an HWSS can convert a Herschel to a pi-heptomino with its domino spark without affecting itself. This concise description can be put before the LifeViewer demonstration, and no future tense is needed. As for the generation counts, as I have said above, they can be left out once the LifeViewer is equipped with commands like T 21 PAUSE 1.

The final census for a methuselah is not so immediately obvious (you have to wait till the evolution ends and count the objects), while the mechanism of a displayed reaction is on the contrary. GUYTU6J (talk) 03:53, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Wait for other's thoughts. GUYTU6J (talk) 05:00, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Yup, this was one of EV's more ambitious early efforts at illustration, before he got really good at making LifeViewer animations I think. There was obviously a lot of work put into it with lots of potentially good ideas. So I've never wanted to just get rid of the non-standard colored images and put it back to the old boring black-and-white version of the article... but I also didn't want to tackle the problem of figuring out how to keep all the good ideas but get the article back looking closer to LifeWiki-standard.

So far I've resisted the impulse to use LifeHistory-type specially colored or marked cell states anywhere in LifeWiki articles, even though cell highlighting could be really useful for pointing out and explaining details in a large complex pattern. The LifeWiki may be a resource for a lot of people who aren't particularly familiar with Golly or multi-state rules. RLE is already pretty mysterious compared to ASCII picture format, so we try to provide the .cells format along with the RLE whenever we can... but it makes sense to just make people get used to regular RLE. It shouldn't be that mysterious. But it seems like it makes sense to keep things simple by not making anyone have to figure out how to get an actual Life pattern out of its LifeHistory version. "Hit Alt+J in Golly" just isn't going to be very obvious to a newcomer.

I think that means that colored images might be a reasonable way to highlight/mark/point out different objects in a pattern. But it should probably also be LifeWiki standard practice to have the RLE pattern for every image available as an embedded LifeViewer or a link -- as is the case for the right-hand image but not the left one.

The larger question for this article is why the pi-heptomino Heisenburp was chosen as an example in the first place. It's a perfectly valid Heisenburp, but it isn't really a very usable reaction in practice: you'd have to add a whole pile of circuitry to detect the eater, clean up the leftover block, produce a clean pi heptomino in the right position in the first place, and so on. There are lots of much cleaner Heisenburp reactions that aren't yet documented in the LifeWiki, but they probably should be -- Mike Playle's Heisenblinker, some of David Bell's original glider-based reactions, recent inventions that detect a passing HWSS while letting an MWSS go past safely on the same lane, etc. Any of those would potentially make a clearer example of a Heisenburp reaction than this complicated pi-Heisenburp mechanism.

As Ultimium says, a detailed example is probably better than no example at all. But I do think the question about redundancy and unnecessary detail is justified, and not rude at all. Probably the right thing to do is to pick a clean example of a Heisenburp reaction and illustrate it at some appropriate level of detail, taking inspiration from EV's example here.

Entity Valkyrie, with the best of intentions, has been known to add a lot of minute technically-true details to the LifeWiki, that ultimately didn't seem to be an improvement -- they just added extra clutter and made it harder for the average reader to understand the articles. You can see something similar happening here with some of the redundant details, but at the same time this seemed like a nice ambitious experiment with a different way of conveying information. Dvgrn (talk) 13:46, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Okay, the part written by EV has been moved to User:Entity Valkyrie 2/Heisenburp. We'll just append other examples here, probably an oscillating one and a stable one is enough. (By the way, does the HWSS-detecting device allowing MWSS to go through count as a Heisenburp?) GUYTU6J (talk) 15:19, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

The content about natural Heisenburp has been moved here for a periodic example. Should stable pseudo-Heisenburp be merged into this article as well? (BTW we need to upload patterns and make LifeViewers for the natural Heisenburp and write about its application)

A note for the pi-heptomino Heisenburp: Martin Grant found an H-to-eater featuring that reaction around the Life day in 2019. Sadly the product cannot be a one-time reflector because the input glider lane is blocked. GUYTU6J (talk) 03:23, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, no, the HWSS-detecting device that allows MWSS to go through is not in any way a Heisenburp. It's not a Heisenburp for MWSSes because it doesn't notice MWSSes going by, and it's not a Heisenburp for HWSSes because it destroys the HWSS. Eventually somebody will build a modern stable HWSS Heisenburp, but for now all we have are the huge out-of-date ones. Dvgrn (talk) 20:35, 25 June 2020 (UTC)