confocaloid wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 2:42 pm
Here is one:
calcyman wrote: ↑April 21st, 2019, 12:20 pm
[...]
Line 3286 contains the cheapest true xs16 (the 3-glider bipond), and line 3287 contains the most expensive pseudo xs16 (the 27-glider
block on snake-tie-snake). This is perfectly consistent with the OEIS count of 3286 strict still lifes of 16 bits.
[...]
Hm, that might be enough to vaguely counterbalance the two questionable "current uses" of the short form on the LifeWiki.
However, that "block on snake-tie-snake" usage is technically not a use of either of the longer terms "cis snake tie snake" or "trans snake tie snake". We have a
suggestion to use the existing shorter terms "cis-snake-tie" and "trans-snake-tie" instead. The analogy to "ship-tie" and "boat-tie" looks vaguely valid to me. There isn't any such thing as "cis-ship-tie", "trans-boat-tie", etc., though, so the analogy is indeed kind of vague.
The
only objection so far to this suggestion cited a lack of uses on the forums of the short forms, and said that the long forms are "already in use". But are the long forms really "already in use"? If neither short forms nor long forms are in use, that's not a compelling reason to use one or the other. Is there another reason that I missed, why we aren't just keeping the existing LifeWiki terms but swapping their meanings?
The "snake-tie-snake" example usage quoted above contains hyphens. The current move proposals (moving to the longer form) don't use hyphens, but the short forms do use hyphens. That might be another vague push in the direction of the short form, but again it's not any kind of strong evidence.
... And then there's
snake bridge snake, which is kind of "the other possible trans-snake-tie". Luckily, though, the
bridge and
tie articles seem to be as clear and consistent as we're likely to get on "snake bridge snake" being a reasonable name for that arrangement.
So it looks to me like just swapping the meanings of the two current short-form terms "cis-snake-tie" and "trans-snake-tie" will get us to a pretty reasonable place. There's still definitely some un-fixable arbitrariness to these name choices, though, so honestly I think that whatever is decided here will be fine, as long as parallel changes are made on the LifeWiki and on Catagolue.
