Search found 21 matches

by tod222
February 26th, 2019, 1:46 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

Verifications are done sequentially, not in parallel. As such, if you have many cores, they'd be under-utilised if verifications were enabled by default. (You can enable this by setting -v 5 in the command-line arguments.) I've found that verifications are so quick that the idle cores aren't worth ...
by tod222
February 26th, 2019, 1:22 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

stupid question: How do you end a search prematurely? If you're using Cygwin or you're on Linux or Mac (anything POSIX, apparently), then type "q" and wait some number of seconds. Your partial haul will be submitted and the search will exit gracefully. As 77topaz mentioned, there are cases where th...
by tod222
February 24th, 2019, 1:20 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

// Disable verification by default if running on a HPC; // otherwise verify three hauls per uploaded haul: if (verifications < 0) { verifications = (parallelisation <= 4) ? 5 : 0; } Why have this? Why shouldn't high-performance computers do verifications? With the increase in CPU cores these days m...
by tod222
January 31st, 2019, 3:38 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Soup-searching as a video game (ethicacha/apgacha)
Replies: 10
Views: 9846

Re: Soup-searching as a video game (ethicacha/apgacha)

You can really lower the barrier to entry for non-mobile (i.e. computer) players by making it a browser game . The soup search could also run in the browser by compiling it to a WebAssembly target. It appears that Webassembly has the necessary instructions to handle 64-bit Lifelib (yes, it's not 256...
by tod222
January 31st, 2019, 1:40 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

Should I switch to v4? V4 is faster now than it was a year ago… Indeed it is! The results below are observed from running the two different versions on my Haswell i7-4790K (4C/8T) at stock clockspeed with 8 threads using log file timestamp values when the system was otherwise idle. OS is Ubuntu 18....
by tod222
January 20th, 2019, 12:52 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

Should I switch to v4?

I recently started running my apgmera install again and I see very few people are running v3.28. Should I upgrade to v4.0? Is the new version faster or more correct? When I asked this question about a year ago, the answer was that there wasn't a compelling reason to upgrade.
by tod222
January 20th, 2019, 12:51 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Catagolue Discussion Thread
Replies: 541
Views: 233976

Re: Catagolue Discussion Thread

What do the colors signify in the root column on the haul pages?
by tod222
January 26th, 2018, 5:05 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: apgsearch v4.0
Replies: 525
Views: 271839

Re: apgsearch v4.0

I recently started running apgmera v3.28 again after many months idle. It's generally running with 2-8 threads depending on what else I'm doing.

For b3s23/C1 is there an advantage to running v4? Is it faster or better?
by tod222
January 19th, 2018, 11:52 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Catagolue Discussion Thread
Replies: 541
Views: 233976

Re: Catagolue Discussion Thread

muzik wrote:Is it just me or are blue hauls in Life no longer a thing?
I've seen red, green, and blue hauls. What do the colors mean?
by tod222
May 20th, 2016, 2:34 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: which 64-bit Linux is best for Golly?
Replies: 11
Views: 7973

Re: which 64-bit Linux is best for Golly?

Running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS here, but will be updating to Ubuntu 16.04 at some point.
by tod222
March 9th, 2016, 11:46 pm
Forum: Website Discussion
Topic: c/10 spaceship beat Gemini's record
Replies: 21
Views: 18460

Re: c/10 spaceship beat Gemini's record

dvgrn wrote:Interesting! Did a news item about the copperhead spaceship show up somewhere very popular, just recently?
Yes, it got at least as high as number 8 on the front page of Hacker News. HN drives traffic the way Slashdot used to.

Direct link to HN discussion.
by tod222
December 14th, 2011, 1:04 am
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Zone of Influence
Replies: 14
Views: 11899

Re: Zone of Influence

Zone of Influence is useful when constructing stable aggregations of smaller stable components, like during a search for stable reflectors. The ZOI of the aggregation is calculated as the union of the ZOI of each cell in the component patterns. I conducted for several months last year a search for s...
by tod222
December 22nd, 2010, 2:38 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Reaction types and terminology
Replies: 4
Views: 3600

Re: Reaction types and terminology

Yes, the block keeper and blinker keeper reactions fall into this category. There are several examples of each, and even a variable-period gun based on the blinker keeper. Ahh, thanks. I found the writeup on the blinker keeper, but nothing about the block keeper. What about every reaction that thro...
by tod222
December 20th, 2010, 11:53 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Reaction types and terminology
Replies: 4
Views: 3600

Reaction types and terminology

[Edited Dec. 22 for spark reaction.] I was wondering about the terminology used for different types of reactions between an active region and a still life. It seems that there are two axes, each with two possibilities: +---------------+---------------+--------------------+ | Modifies | Object | Obje...
by tod222
November 14th, 2010, 2:19 pm
Forum: Other Cellular Automata
Topic: 3458/37/4
Replies: 20
Views: 14604

Re: 3458/37/4

ynotds wrote:A p250 switch engine which moves (2,2) per cycle
I like the little eye-catching P8 oscillator that's part of it:

Code: Select all

x = 3, y = 3, rule = 3458/37/4
.C$B2A$3A!
by tod222
October 14th, 2010, 12:04 pm
Forum: Other Cellular Automata
Topic: Wired blog article about Minecraft
Replies: 5
Views: 5115

Wired blog article about Minecraft

On Gadget Lab, one of the Wired blogs:

Geeky Gamers Build Working Computers out of Virtual Blocks

There you go, Ajax!
by tod222
October 13th, 2010, 7:42 pm
Forum: Website Discussion
Topic: Updating the main applet
Replies: 11
Views: 12067

Re: Updating the main applet

I suggest having the index page link to the forums, wiki, applet, and possibly soup page. Yes, the front page should have links to the rest of the great content here, and a very brief intro to Life. My suggestions: Put the main applet on a separate page. It sounds like coding it in Javascript would...
by tod222
October 4th, 2010, 10:55 am
Forum: Website Discussion
Topic: How to paste code
Replies: 12
Views: 13194

Select All corrupts RLE in Firefox

Confirming the report from Ajax that "Select All" on Firefox adds leading spaces to the copied RLE text which then does not correctly paste into Golly. I patched my version of Golly to remove the spaces, but that's not practical for most users. If the Firefox addon Copy Plain Text hadn't been abando...
by tod222
September 12th, 2010, 9:21 pm
Forum: Patterns
Topic: Thread For Your Accidental Discoveries
Replies: 2046
Views: 1412669

Re: Thread For Your Accidental Discoveries

It's a shame that soups like this from Andrzej Okrasinski's census were never made public (apart from the P2 Lightbulb); Several rare oscillators like Tim Coe's P8 and the P5 Fumarole occurred naturally, and the soups might have led to improved glider syntheses. He did release a results document on...
by tod222
August 31st, 2010, 2:16 am
Forum: Scripts
Topic: Speed optimization, automation of golly perl scripts
Replies: 3
Views: 4973

Speed optimization, automation of golly perl scripts

I'm guessing your script has lots of g_run() calls mixed up with lots of editing calls? Exactly. If so, put a g_new() call at the start of your script -- that will prevent lots of temporary files being created and the script will run faster. This solution assumes your script is creating a pattern r...
by tod222
August 29th, 2010, 2:44 pm
Forum: Scripts
Topic: Speed optimization, automation of golly perl scripts
Replies: 3
Views: 4973

Speed optimization, automation of golly perl scripts

Is there a way to manipulate Golly's Undo/Redo setting from a Perl script? In Golly 2.1, some scripts can generate GiBs of undo info, eating disk space and slowing down the script. I've just written such a script. It would be useful to be able to save the state and disable Undo at the start of the s...