OCA landing page and/or OCA CurrentNews

[dvgrn]

Here's a topic that's been discussed on and off in the Discord ConwayLife Lounge for a while. Should anything be done to try to get notable OCA stuff organized a little better -- e.g., figure out how and when to move notable OCA pages out of the user namespace, and also advertise interesting new OCA current-news somewhere, similar to the way we've been cataloguing Conway's Life current news on the LifeWiki's main page?

I thought that these ideas had made it over to the forums at some point, but I can't find much of anything on a search. As a starting point, here's a cross-post of some relevant discussion from Discord. Anyone can please feel free to cross-post whatever I've missed, add new discussion points, etc.

From Discord #general-discussion:

dvgrn — 11/25/2023 7:05 AM
Anyone have an opinion on including extra-cool OCA engineering in CurrentNews? Or, probably better if it worked, would somebody be interested in maintaining an OCA CurrentNews similar to the Conway's Life one?

Para — 11/25/2023 10:46 AM
yes
although, it'd be harder to keep up with OCA probably

dvgrn — 11/25/2023 10:57 AM
Seems like what would be hardest would be filtering OCA discoveries to include a small enough amount of "most newsworthy" stuff, so that the OCACurrentNews list doesn't get overwhelmed with clutter -- but the really good stuff does get mentioned.

I'm not about to tackle the painful problem of setting up some kind of contribution/voting system for OCA, but if a team of people got together and worked on it they could probably come up with something workable -- an arbitrary threshold of a certain number of likes on a forum post and/or number of thumbs-up reactions on a Discord post, for example.

NimbleRogue — 02/04/2024 2:19 AM
I think this would be great, but I would wonder if having a separate page for that would be good, how currently is the "in the news" list curated?

dvgrn — 02/04/2024 7:19 AM
Because the CurrentNews list is transcluded on the main page, it's locked down more than most other pages. Standard practice is to make suggestions either in the Suggested LifeWiki Edits forum thread or in the "editable news items submission page" linked on the wiki main page, or sometimes here on Discord. LifeWiki moderators (and/or editors-not-moderators, I think) then copy-edit and move those items to the Current News list.

hotdogPi — 02/04/2024 7:20 AM
I'm able to do so, but I refuse to put OCA stuff in CurrentNews.

dvgrn — 02/04/2024 7:22 AM
I don't really want OCA stuff in the current CurrentNews, either, but with the current situation of not having an OCA CurrentNews to put interesting news items in, it seems like a good compromise to allow an occasional OCA item in the list.

In the event of a separate OCA CurrentNews list, probably a new thread would be created on the forums' OCA board, and/or possibly even a new channel here, for hashing out what the community thinks is notable enough to add.

dvgrn — 02/04/2024 7:30 AM
In my original discussion with Nathaniel about setting up a separate OCA CurrentNews list, it seemed like room could be made on the LifeWiki home page to display the OCA list -- basically it would be a way to appropriately acknowledge the existence of the growing body of OCA-namespace information, while keeping it clearly separated from main-namespace vanilla-Life information.

That idea ran into some pushback -- mainly from you, @hotdogPi , I think -- and so nothing along those lines has been implemented. The idea shifted to maybe a whole separate landing page for the OCA namespace, with its own CurrentNews and DYK list, maybe its own set of featured-article snippets, etc. Then we could just link to the OCA landing page from the main page, and leave it at that.

We'll probably need at least a few more moderators and/or editors-not-moderators, who would volunteer to focus specifically on OCA.

[confocaloid]

[...] In the event of a separate OCA CurrentNews list, probably a new thread would be created on the forums' OCA board, [...] for hashing out what the community thinks is notable enough to add. [...]

A new thread with that purpose could be created right now, before (or even without) having a separate landing page elsewhere.

I think sharing "proposed current news" can work by itself, without a further step of "actual current news". Instead of trying to determine "what the community thinks is notable enough to add", there would be a place where every forum member can post about a discovery or an event that they personally believe to be notable enough for the current-news level, in a "current-news format" with some details and relevant links.

[...] The idea shifted to maybe a whole separate landing page for the OCA namespace, with its own CurrentNews and DYK list, maybe its own set of featured-article snippets, etc. Then we could just link to the OCA landing page from the main page, and leave it at that.

We'll probably need at least a few more moderators and/or editors-not-moderators, who would volunteer to focus specifically on OCA.

In case if there will be a separate "landing page", it doesn't need to be located within LifeWiki. I think a dedicated forum thread would work as a place to collect news items.

This could be mostly similar to the above alternative of not having any "actual current news". To add a news item, it would suffice to make a post describing a new discovery (either eliminating or simplifying the puzzle of finding enough moderators).

If one wants to enforce higher S/N ratio to reduce clutter within that forum thread, then one could invent some rule-based filtering system, and explain the rules in the first post.

[hibiscus]

I was thinking about this again after being reminded of the fact that A World of Cellular Automata still remains unfinished. Obviously, the establishment of an OCA Current News portal would compliment the release of the OCA book nicely.

Anyway, I feel I shouldn't be bringing this back up without bringing something new to the table. Here's what I imagine an OCA CurrentNews could (as of today) look like, in the style of Life CurrentNews:

• May 5: NimbleRogue discovers a c/64 orthogonal spaceship in B357/S5678, the first such elementary example in a life-like cellular automaton.
• May 3: Sylvani finds a p2 photon in B23568/S1478, the first example of a photon in a self-complementary life-like B23 rule.
• March 26: Sylvani finds a record-breaking (in terms of minimum population) (2,1)c/4 knightship in a life-like cellular automaton in the rule B2567/S4578.
• February 20: Keith Amling finds a new velocity of spaceship in the rule Seeds (B2/S): a c/4 orthogonal spaceship.
• February 14: qqd proves that the rule 3-4 Life (B34/S34) is capable of universal computation.

None of the entries are set in stone; right now, they are merely suggestions. New entries can be added, amended, or removed based on community consensus (but we still haven't clarified the exact voting process, which is one of the main reasons I am posting here).

Ideally, the first thing we should be determining before going ahead with this is an avenue where said consensus can be made: any ideas? My best proposal right now would be creating a thread where users may discuss entries posted on the "OCA Current News" thread in the OCA board; the OCAmmittee (currently EvinZL, hibiscus, NimbleRogue, silversmith, Sylvani and speedydelete) will vote on their inclusion and, should the entry pass, the "official" version of the OCA CurrentNews page will be edited accordingly. My only real objection to this would be the sheer number of posts created as singular votes; hence why I am partially inclined to use Discord for establishing consensus. If other members of the community have ideas on where consensus can be made, please do tell; once that is figured out, we will discuss the exact details on voting.

[hibiscus]

I have gone ahead and made an "OCA Main Page" in my userspace: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/User:Hibiscus/OCA_Main.
Once the DYKs and the week's featured articles (we only have 53 of them to deal with) are filled up, I plan to move the page (and the OCA CurrentNews page also residing in my userspace) to OCA:Main Page.

ocamainpage.png (235.08 KiB) Viewed 6925 times

[TheWayOfTheCon]

I have gone ahead and made an "OCA Main Page" in my userspace: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/User:Hibiscus/OCA_Main.
Once the DYKs and the week's featured articles (we only have 53 of them to deal with) are filled up, I plan to move the page (and the OCA CurrentNews page also residing in my userspace) to OCA:Main Page.

Here are a few DYK suggestions.

• "...that Brian's Brain did not have any known orthogonal spaceships below the speed of light until New Year's Eve 2020, when a c/5o was found??"

• "...that Catagolue lists over 18,000 rules as of May 2026?"

• "...that the Life-like rule Gems has an elementary c/5648o spaceship, which is the slowest in any outer-totalistic two-state rule?"

[WhiteHawk]

Love the renewed work on this! Question for discussion: In the event a separate OCA page is launched, will an OCAWiki tab be added to the top or will OCA Current news be some sort of toggle embedded on the current LifeWiki page?

[Nathaniel]

Question for discussion: In the event a separate OCA page is launched, will an OCAWiki tab be added to the top or will OCA Current news be some sort of toggle embedded on the current LifeWiki page?

I'm of course open to suggestions on this, but my first thought is to put the "OCA" link in the "Welcome to LifeWiki" bar that shows up on the LifeWiki main page. E.g., there is currently a "Wicks" link at the top-right of that box that (in my opinion) is probably a bit less super-duper important that some of the other links there and could be turned into a bold "Other Cellular Automata" link.

[hibiscus]

The Wicks category only has 37 pages in total. Besides dividing the links into "unbold" and "bold" sections, I imagine the category simply isn't as important to include on the Main Page as some of the others...
Also, since it's being implied that changes will be implemented, I might as well move the page to the OCAspace sometime soon.
Edit (2026/05/27 16:57): It has been done.