OCA talk:Tlife

Catagolue links

I noticed that all three links at the bottom of the page are for "Tlife", even though they link to the tlife, tHighLife, and tDryLife pages. Is there any way around that? The LinkCatagolueRule template seems to be reading the page name, which obviously doesn't work here. A for awesome (talk) 16:33, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, the template supports a rulename= parameter and only defaults to the pagename if no name is explicitely specified using that. I've edited the article to use this parameter. Apple Bottom (talk) 12:05, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! A for awesome (talk) 02:56, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

My thoughts

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condition vs transition

Re: "... it also stomped on a valid improvement, "condition" -> "transition"." -- that is an incorrect summary of what happened.
Instead, my initial edit changed "transition" to "condition" since that is more correct (see for example thread732). A transition is an event that can happen with a cell (e.g. birth is a transition from "dead" to "alive"). A condition is a part of a rule definition, e.g. specific neighbourhood ("B6" = "birth when there are 6 alive neighbours" is a condition).
Then my edit was reverted without any explanation, which included both restoring alternative name for a rule that is not found on the forum, and revert of my change of "transition" to "condition". The revert was not a valid improvement. Confocal (talk) 15:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not too surprised that I didn't get the summary exactly correct, but I do still object to the edit warring, which is what these undo-redo-undo sequences amount to. The original source of that "condition" wording makes things all the more interesting, I suppose. I don't immediately agree with the use of "condition" in that context. Before you edited it again just now, the entire article contained similar phrases, like "differing by only two transitions" in the first paragraph.

That's a very common usage, and it looks like you must have noticed that adding one inconsistent use of "condition" lower down in the article was not actually an improvement.

The link to thread 732 is an appeal to an authority from way back in 2011 -- a post by Tropylium. I haven't seen that usage of "condition" getting picked up very much for use in situations like this, though it's certainly used sometimes, like in Life-like cellular automaton and Strobing rule.

This "condition" vs. "transition" might be a good new topic for the LifeWiki Discussion board. I'm a bit surprised that you decided to unilaterally go ahead and change all existing uses of "transition" to "condition" in the article, as you have just done -- especially immediately after a moderator made an edit to try to settle an edit war. You've been asked very recently to avoid second-guessing moderator edits in this way.

There are quite a lot of other LifeWiki articles where "transition" is used in the exact sense that you've now edited out of the tlife article. There seems to be some disagreement on this condition-vs.-transition point, so some discussion definitely needs to happen before any more such changes are made. Dvgrn (talk) 16:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I did say "for example" when linking to the thread. More recent examples are easy to find via forum search: "birth condition", "survival condition", "death condition".
Re: "unilaterally go ahead" -- I don't think that is valid either. My edit is an attempt to improve the content (by switching to clearer wording), per point #1 in LW:DR. Confocal (talk) 16:56, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

The action that I described as "unilaterally going ahead" happened immediately after I changed the wording back. In making that change I was attempting to recognize an edit war that seemed to be beginning. Please be careful to avoid immediately reverting moderators' actions, as you did here (you changed "transition" back to "condition", which I had just changed back.) When a moderator gets involved, you're no longer on step 1 of LW:DR -- and you had skipped the "discussion" part of step 1, anyway.

You've been making enough of these impressively confident but misguided "re-undo" types of edits, that moderators have had to invent a whole new system to try and deal with them. Please do your best from now on to disengage and de-escalate in these kinds of situations, rather than doubling down and making four of the same edit that just got undone. Whenever you can do so, please feel free to skip down the LW:DR list to the "wait a week" parts; this will be a big help to me and other people who are trying to reduce unnecessary edit-war unpleasantness. Dvgrn (talk) 18:11, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Of course I did not 'skipped the "discussion" part'. I am participating in discussion on this right here and now, once it is more or less clear what should be discussed.
(And with an unexplained undo like this, there was nothing to discuss, because there was no explanation for the undo.) Confocal (talk) 18:29, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Okay. We've established that I get details wrong fairly regularly. I don't perfectly correctly describe everything that you did, in every case ... at least in your opinion. This is very, very likely to continue to happen -- I will happily acknowledge that it has happened and will (probably) happen in the future, but I don't feel much need to apologize for it. Moderators quite simply are not always going to have time to double-check every nuance of every past edit, before figuring out a reasonable thing to try, to avoid LifeWiki edit wars and move forward. Moderators expect you to cooperate with efforts to reduce future edit wars, even in the absence of perfect communications.

Here I'm pointing out something that I'd really like you, specifically, to avoid doing so much in the future. You're still doing far too many repeated edits, changing something back after another editor just made it clear that they objected to the change. Maybe the reasons for the objection aren't always as clear as you'd like, but the existence of the objection is perfectly clear.

Now, sometimes you're going to be right about the issue in question, sometimes you're not going to be right. But no matter whether you're right or not, a re-undo is in general no longer an appropriate thing for you to do in advance of good-faith attempts to discuss in other ways.

You say you 'did not skip the "discussion" part'. What good-faith attempt to discuss this issue did I miss in this case, before you changed the four instances of "transition" back to "condition"? Dvgrn (talk) 18:59, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

My first reply on this talk page was such an attempt. After that, I edited the article accordingly. Directly making the suggested changes is easier/more straightforward than trying to describe the same suggested changes on the talk page, and it is easier to understand what are the changes if they can be viewed directly as a diff. Confocal (talk) 19:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I understand the theory of making the edits directly as part of a discussion. That's great when the issue in question is not too controversial -- i.e., when people haven't already made the mistake of escalating with repeated undo-redo-undo cycles, to the point where a moderator gets involved.

Once a moderator is involved, the situation has generally moved on to the "disengage and wait a week" stage. It doesn't work very well to pretend the issue is still in the non-controversial stage at that point -- it just makes it look like you're absolutely certain that your point of view is the correct one.

If you want to make proposed edits of this kind without giving that impression of over-confidence in your own opinion, I'd suggest that you start being more careful to include polite wording in your edit summaries, such as "this is a proposed edit only; please feel free to undo if this is controversial". Neither your first reply nor your edit summary seem to give any sign that you are considering the possibility that you might be wrong about which term is "more correct" -- or, leaving right vs. wrong aside, whether there might be significant objections from the community about you making that change.

Since the change you made was just a "suggested change", I'll go ahead and undo it for now, since it will still be visible as a diff. Would you care to open a new thread on LifeWiki discussion about "condition" vs. "transition", with a link to that diff -- and then we'll see how things go from there? Dvgrn (talk) 19:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I already started a thread on the slightly wider question of CA rule definition terminology. Confocal (talk) 19:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I've added a post there. I guess the other idea that I'd like to get across is this: you characterized your first reply on the talk page as an attempt at discussion. But it's just plain not a discussion until somebody responds. I'm going to be taking a dim view of edits that undo other edits in the future, until enough time has passed that a discussion could reasonably happen. (Whether it actually happens or not is a different question, of course!) Dvgrn (talk) 20:20, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Re: "the existence of the objection is perfectly clear." -- even the existence of some specific objection was not clear in this case. https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff=141307&oldid=141270 That is an undo without any explanation at all reverting two unrelated changes at once, and not a valid objection.
Re: "condition" vs. "transition" -- I posted several quotes, both from forum posts and from other CA-related sources outside this website. These quotes show that the proper common term for something like B3j or S8 is 'condition'. Confocal (talk) 21:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I would say that those quotes show 'condition' is a proper common term for something like B3j or S8. I don't see that those links give any evidence at all that 'condition' is the proper term -- and it doesn't look like it's nearly as common as 'transition'. You've labeled 'transition' as jargon, which seems like something of a death sentence in your mind for LifeWiki usage -- but that's just another premise that I haven't been convinced of yet.

'Transition' has been plenty precise enough to be used without any controversy in dozens of LifeWiki articles, up to now. It matches common usage. It's clear from context what it means. 'Condition' doesn't sound right to me in some of these cases, because it doesn't match common usage. Some of those proposed and implied changes look like they will cause more confusion than they solve (since I don't think the current uses of 'transition' are actually causing any real confusion). Dvgrn (talk) 23:36, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Replied in https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=171629#p171629 Confocal (talk) 00:12, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't remember ever seeing "condition" in this context. These things are generally called "transitions" in my experience. Although usually it refers to an INT transition, not an OT transition, especially in the context of an INT rule, so maybe "B6 transitions" is more appropriate. --Galoomba (talk) 01:01, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

I posted several quotes in the forum thread ( https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=6235 ) and more examples can be found via search.
In this case, tlife is non-totalistic, and it is fairly clear that both S2i and S4q are isotropic non-totalistic conditions. (It would be even more clear that these conditions are expressed in Hensel notation, if my edit was not reverted by User:Dvgrn.) When the context is a discussion of Life-like cellular automata, there are just 9 birth conditions and 9 survival conditions (from 0 to 8 alive neighbours in each case). In general the set of distinguishable conditions depends on the specific way to define/specify a rule from some rulespace. Confocal (talk) 01:09, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Just for the record: @confocaloid, I reverted your latest attempt to continue your extremely ill-advised edit war with a moderator. This time the revert wasn't accidental, and I don't think any apology from me is needed.

I've tried to lay out my reasons again very carefully on the relevant forum thread. If there's something you don't understand, please ask questions. If there's something you disagree with, please follow the LW:DR guidelines and involve another moderator -- after at least a week has passed. However, I'd advise that you review my explanation very thoroughly a time or two, and think about the whole issue very carefully, before you involve anyone else. Other moderators aren't necessarily nearly as patient as I am. Dvgrn (talk) 14:51, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

It is one thing when one actually directly states their objections (i.e. explains why some changes are not considered improvements). It is another thing when one is merely asserting "I object" without explaining why. That is not a valid objection. (Otherwise any edit in any article could be arbitrarily reverted with summary as illuminating as "There's no need to change this." or "I've reverted that change for now, mostly to register a clear objection.") Unfortunately this is the first post that actually contained a direct explanation. And it only appeared after some attempts to invoke "slippery slope" or otherwise blame me.
Re: "moderator hat", if you blame people instead of/before trying to actually understand the issue, then it shouldn't come as a great surprise when those people find it harder and harder to take your words seriously / trust you in that you will not mishandle future situations like this again and again. This is my feedback anyway. Confocal (talk) 16:00, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Please remember that in this case you're dealing with a moderator on a limited time budget who is trying to stop unpleasant edit wars. You're perfectly correct that just "I object" by itself would be a lousy edit summary, if it was not followed by good-faith attempts to discuss and explain the objection elsewhere. However, I made several such good-faith attempts -- I've spent quite a lot of time on this issue this week. It's not actually a requirement to explain an objection to your perfect satisfaction on the first try, especially when you don't ask any actual clarifying questions.

Coming from a moderator, an even a minimal registered objection is intended to be a clear signal that the edit under discussion is in fact controversial -- and that it has moved to a later stage of the LW:DR dispute resolution list. It's just plain not ever going to work to ignore a moderator objection on the grounds that it's "not a valid objection". The objection might not be clear to you yet, but that's because the topic is a work in progress.

Again because my time for doing moderator stuff is somewhat limited, in this case I was looking for help from other members of the community in explaining the objection to you -- so my immediate initial response post included this text:

I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Should we leave the four uses of "transition" in the OCA:Tlife article the way they currently are, or would it be better to change them to "condition"?

Any responses from other members of the community would have been fine by me. Your charge that, if someone else showed up who also wanted to change 'transition' to 'condition', I would be likely to mistreat them somehow ... well, honestly, it looks to me like you're making mountains out of molehills. I wouldn't necessarily agree with them, of course, and I wouldn't necessarily do what they say, but I wouldn't accuse them of malfeasance or anything.

In this case, I expected that the moderator objection would have temporarily stopped you from attempting to re-make the objectionable edits, until you had made some good-faith efforts of your own to understand the objection, and you honestly believed that the edits in question were no longer controversial. Moderators won't always have time to explain everything instantly -- they might incorrectly think that their explanation is clear, as in this case. It's going to be up to you to ask questions if an objection is not in fact clear to you.

Now, I don't mind explaining all of these edit-war-related expectations to you several times, if necessary, until you understand them. Some of these rules that I'm laying out here are pretty new, because we've never had a need for them before... because we've never had this many pointless LifeWiki edit wars before.

I don't particularly want you to feel "blamed" or "picked on", though I certainly do want you to reduce how often you quickly undo controversial LifeWiki edits, going forward. Please do try to understand that the rules I'm describing are going to be the rules going forward, until and unless they have to change again. Dvgrn (talk) 01:41, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Regarding "It is likely one of the best-studied non-totalistic rules in existence"

Does that statement still hold true? I noticed that the LeapLife thread has double the number of posts than the tlife thread. (Of course, many posts in the LeapLife thread doesn't include discoveries.)

P.S. Why is tDryLeapLife listed on the LeapLife page but not on tlife page? Iddi01 (talk) 10:25, 25 April 2024 (UTC)