Gustavo6046 wrote:Seems like a ship can be converted into a block! Just add a semi-catalyst (i.e. reappering offset) block!
Unfortunately the same can be done with one glider and no block.
This has been known for 40+ years. As has been pointed out several times, all collisions of a single glider into all small objects have been done decades ago. I also don't know why you say it's "unfortunate" that it can be done more easily. Such reductions are always good news, not bad news. (Also, if you're going to make an assertion like this, it's usually a good idea to post a RLE with it so people can know what you are talking about. "A single glider can destroy a ship" is something anyone can easily reproduce and verify on their own within a few minutes. "A single glider and a semi-catalyst block can destroy a ship" is not so easy to reproduce.)
Gustavo6046 wrote:But I found a glider and two boats result in the same glider (offset by 1) and a beehive; just in the case there's something good on it. ...
Again, you're colliding a glider into something complex, and getting something that could be done much more easily, with no appreciable benefit. Do you know how you would get the two boats there, or how expensive it would be? Since a beehive can be made with two gliders, the result can be duplicated with 3 gliders, meaning that for this to break even, you would have to make the two boats from 2 gliders, and for this to be an improvement, the two boats would have to be made from 1 glider! Since all 2-glider collisions have been done decades ago, 2 is impossible. It just happens that there ARE 3-glider collisions that make two boats situated like this, but that's still more expensive.
Once again, this is like throwing grenades at Ferraris to see what kind of useful spare parts would result. While it's certainly useful to do this kind of research (e.g. smashing a glider into something in every possible way to see if anything interesting comes up), posting such results for others to see is generally NOT useful, especially when it is well known that this very same result has already been done decades ago by many people. Obvious exceptions, of course, are when such collisions DO result in something interesting or unique, but those tend to be rare (e.g. the glider half-bakery collision that results in a glider and half-bakery).
I have many fewer posts on this site than you do, even though I have been here longer, and have been playing with Life for 45 years. I have a synthesis database of over 10000 glider syntheses. Probably 95%+ of these are boring and trivial derivatives, useful for informational and statistical purposes (e.g. like in a dictionary) but not "interesting" in any other way. Can you imagine what these forums would look like if I posted every single one of them? Reading them would be like weeding through an inbox full of spam just to read the few emails that are actually relevant.
Even worse, look at the tremendous research being done by apgsearch. There have been trillions of objects found. Can you imagine if every single one of those was posted here? There probably wouldn't be enough space on the Internet to hold them. Fortunately, those results are just saved on Catagolue, and available for specific searches and statistical analysis. Only the most interesting and significant results are posted here, and on the Twitter feed.
The point on these forums is not to post every single experiment and spur-of-the-moment thought, but rather, things that others can find useful (e.g. new or cheaper syntheses of objects, new useful and usable conduits), ideas that are not working but have been substantially thought out (e.g. syntheses or conduits that almost work, but lack some small part that someone else might be able to help with), partial solutions to outstanding problems (e.g. partial synthesis steps for exotic spaceships), etc.
You should spend some more time reading the other forums (on various subjects), to see what kinds of things people post there, in terms of usability and completeness. You should also spend some time making yourself more familiar with what has been done on Life during the past several decades (e.g. from the Wiki, the links page, the Life lexicon, the synthesis database, etc.) to know which territories have been explored, and to avoid wasting time re-exploring it. While re-inventing the wheel can often be a useful learning exercise, nobody else wants to read about everyone else's step-by-step process in doing so.
